Keynote: Stephen Kieran, FAIA

Our future is the past. We have been adding less than one percent to the building stock of the USin recent years. Renewal of existing structures is now more than half of architectural billings. We will explore this long emerging reality across six dimensions:    

• By the Numbers: Demography of architecture.
• By the Carbon: Lives of buildings across time.
• By the Money: First cost and cost of ownership across time.
• By the Memories: Placing value on personal and cultural remembrance.
• By the Stewardship: Strategies and tactics in support of a culture of care.
• By the Artistry: Prospects for authorship and craft across generations.

The ethical and design opportunities this work presents for architecture are enormous – if we embrace them.

Stephen Kieran, FAIA, LEED Fellow, treats architecture as a meeting place for art and science—a conviction that has shaped KieranTimberlake’s research-driven practice for more than four decades. From the early adoption of building information modeling and environmental analysis tools to close collaboration with fabricators and materials scientists, Steve has continually shifted expectations of the architect’s role, bringing technical rigor and intuition to bear on the same problem.

His work includes the new Interdisciplinary Engineering Building at University of Washington, Scaife Hall at Carnegie Mellon, the renovation and addition to the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the ongoing House Renewal projects at Harvard University. Earlier projects—like Loblolly House, an off-site fabricated home in the Chesapeake Bay; SmartWrap™, a mass-customizable building envelope exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum; Cellophane House™, a fully recyclable, energy-gathering dwelling exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art; and the Embassy of the United States in London, which sets an agenda to achieve carbon neutrality—reflect a sustained inquiry into how buildings gather energy, conserve resources, and adapt over time.

Under his guidance, the firm has received over 300 design citations, including the AIA Firm Award and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award. With co-founder James Timberlake, Steve was an inaugural recipient of the Benjamin Latrobe Fellowship for architectural design research from the AIA College of Fellows in 2001, and together they have co-authored seven books on architecture, including the influential refabricating Architecture and the recent monograph KieranTimberlake: Fullness.

Steve lectures internationally to academic, industry, and public audiences and has served onnumerous award juries, including the AIA College of Fellows Latrobe Prize Jury. He has held visiting professorships at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, the University of Washington, Yale University, and the University of Michigan, and a full-time professorship at Princeton University.

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