KieranTimberlake Partner and Research Director Billie Faircloth has been honored with a 2017 Women in Architecture Award from Architectural Record. The award, presented to an architect for outstanding work in “innovative design, materials or building type,” celebrates Faircloth's work in spearheading an inventive transdisciplinary approach in KieranTimberlake's Research Group and across the firm.

“KieranTimberlake is committed to a collective intelligence model, where questioning thrives,” Faircloth, who joined the firm in 2008, said. “These past ten years have been deeply gratifying. I have helped build a culture of experimentation where questions are a true expression of our aspirations, and searching and searching again is part of our everyday practice.”  
 
Faircloth added that in a product-driven industry, she's especially pleased to be recognized for cultivating ideas and methods. "We've received recognition for our architecture, our analysis of green roof vegetation, our software development. In this instance, the award points to the design of a process, a culture, a practice.”  
 

“Billie is redefining and expanding the horizon of an entire profession,” partner Stephen Kieran said. “She is forging a way forward for us all toward an architecture that humanizes science and technology in the service of people and place. She demonstrates day in and day out that giving agency to the most compelling questions of our time provokes an architecture of great wonder and beauty.”

 
 
Faircloth cites KieranTimberlake research projects like Tally, a lifecycle assessment software, as the unique byproduct of the firm's diverse intellectual background. “Our transdisciplinary approach is both a design philosophy and advocacy for developing collective intelligence models within our discipline,” she said. “Architects don't know everything. We need to work with those outside of our field—urban ecologists, material scientists, computer scientists, or physicists—and together create a meaningful approach for the design of the built environment. Alone, we cannot sufficiently see and comprehend the true nature of design problems.” 
 
Faircloth's current projects include Roast, a thermal comfort survey app, Ideal Choice Homes, and a research collaboration with the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture in Denmark on thermodynamic material systems.