working for people and their built buildings

Built Buildings Lab collaborates with organizations dedicated to preserving, salvaging and adapting existing buildings for the benefit of the public and the planet. Vacated, disregarded, beloved, landmarked— all buildings represent past and future livelihoods, cultural and economic investments. Whether it's one building, a neighborhood, a campus, or an entire city, Built Buildings Lab's mission is to help people realize the full value of existing buildings.

our team.

Lori Ferriss, AIA, PE

Co-Founder and Executive Director

Lori Ferriss, co-founder and executive director of Built Buildings Lab, is an internationally recognized expert in leveraging existing and historic buildings toward a sustainable, resilient, and equitable future. Her award-winning work as an architect, structural engineer, conservator, and educator combines broad policy development with deep technical insights to harness the existing built environment as a climate solution.  

Lori is a pioneer in quantifying the environmental benefits of building reuse. She is a co-developer of Architecture 2030’s CARE Tool, which estimates the carbon benefits of reusing and retrofitting buildings, and her work on this topic has been published in peer reviewed publications and presented at venues from preservation conferences to the UN COP.  She brings her perspective as a practitioner and technical expert to policy making and implementation through her appointment to the City of Boston’s BERDO Review Board and as the Climate Heritage Network’s liaison to the UNEP Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction. 

The AIA recognized Lori with the Young Architect Award for expanding the role of architects while elevating building reuse as a prime strategy to combat climate change. She was the 2023 Chair of the AIA Committee on the Environment and serves as a Steering Committee representative of the Climate Heritage Network, a founding Co-Chair of the Zero Net Carbon Collaboration for Existing and Historic Buildings, an expert member on the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Energy, Sustainability and Climate Change, and a Senior Fellow of Architecture 2030.

Billie Faircloth, FAIA

Co-Founder and Research Director

Billie Faircloth is a design leader, educator, and transdisciplinarian who has transformed practice-integrated research and earned a national and international reputation for demonstrating its value, methods, and outcomes. As former partner and research director at the Philadelphia-based architectural practice KieranTimberlake, 2008 to 2024, Faircloth guided the collaborative development of award-winning architecture, planning, and research projects, including TallyLCA, which provides designers with an actionable understanding of the embodied environmental impacts of buildings.

Architectural Record celebrated Faircloth's relentless pioneering of transdisciplinary practice-based research when it selected her as its 2017 Women in Architecture Innovator Award winner. Faircloth is currently on the Board of Directors for the nonprofit Building Transparency. She previously served on the AIA Committee on the Environment and was its Chair in 2022. She also served the International Union of Architects (UIA) World Congress of Architects by co-convening the Design for Climate Adaptation science track between 2020 - 2023. Faircloth will join Cornell University in 2025 as an associate professor in the Department of Architecture and a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.


our board of directors.