MONDAY | APR 14 | 4pm reception | 5pm lecture | AB 100

The annual Whitehead Guest Lecture on Sustainability, on April 14 this year, will feature Cornell Professor Felix Heisel from Cornell’s Circular Construction Lab.  Professor Heisel will share his team’s efforts to move the designing and building industries towards a “circular economy” in an effort to minimize waste and pollution in building practices while facilitating the reuse and recycling of building materials over time. The Estopinal College of Architecture and Planning will hold a reception at 4 p.m. in the first floor art gallery of the Architecture Building. The lecture will begin at 5 p.m. in AB 100, just across the lobby from the gallery reception site.

Mr. Heisel’s lecture, “Deconstruction and Cultivation: Advances in Circular Construction,” is the third in the Ethan Whitehead Guest Lecture in Sustainability. Ethan Whitehead was studying architecture when he passed away in 2021. In his honor, his parents Julie and Doug Whitehead established the Ethan Whitehead Guest Lecture in Sustainability Fund to develop a lecture series to inform and inspire as many people as possible on a topic that was close to Ethan’s heart.

Situated at the crossroads of architecture, engineering, material and computer science, and economics, the work of the Cornell Circular Construction Lab explores innovative concepts, methods, and processes on

designing buildings as material depots for future construction and utilizing the current built environment as an ‘urban mine’ for today’s projects. Understanding architecture as integral to regenerative and restorative cycles, the lab engages design, policy and collaboration to drive sustainability. Through strategic partnerships with academic, industrial, and legislative partners, the lab tests and validates the full-scale adoption of circular construction practices to achieve a sustainable, low/no-carbon future.

Estopinal College of Architecture and Planning guest lecture series is free and open to the public.

Biography

Felix Heisel is assistant professor and the director of the Circular Construction Lab at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. He is a faculty fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, and a graduate field member in architecture, systems engineering and design technology. He is a licensed architect in Germany and partner of 2hs Architekten und Ingenieur PartGmbB, an office specialized in the development of circular prototypologies.  

Mr. Heisel’s scholarship focuses on a systemic redesign of the built environment as a material depot of endless use and reconfiguration. He has received various awards for his work and published several books and articles on the topic, including Building Better- Less – Different: Circular Construction and Circular Economy (Birkhäuser, 2022).

A graduate of Berlin University of the Arts, he has taught and conducted research around the world, including at the Berlage Institute; the Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction, and City Developments; the Future Cities Laboratory Singapore; ETH Zürich; and Harvard GSD. 

Learning Objectives

• Learn how the principles of circular construction can be applied to reduce the construction industry’s carbon footprint 

• Learn how waste can be understood as a resource for the design and construction of buildings 

• Learn how circular construction principles have been applied in several case studies over a range of typologies and scales. 

• Learn how regenerative materials such as mushroom mycelium can help diversify the industry’s sustainable material portfolio