As the 2018 BarberMcMurry Professor, Billie Faircloth taught an interdisciplinary design studio made up of students from all three schools in the college: architecture, interior architecture, and landscape architecture.
In her professional and academic research, Billie Faircloth seeks to answer the question, “Why do we build the way that we do?”
As a partner at KieranTimberlake, Faircloth leads a transdisciplinary group of professionals in fields as diverse as environmental management, chemical physics, materials science, and architecture to foster collaboration between disciplines, trades, academies, and industries.
Having taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Faircloth was named last year as the College of Architecture and Design’s 2018 BarberMcMurry Professor.
Since 2013, the BarberMcMurry Endowed Professorship has promoted design excellence through teaching by an internationally recognized architect. The professorship is the result of a $1 million endowment given by Blanche Barber and architects at BarberMcMurry Architects, an East Tennessee architecture and design firm.
I work with students to explore design agency at the interface of architecture, ecology, and materials.
– Billie Faircloth, the College of Architecture and Design’s 2018 BarberMcMurry Professor
Last semester, Faircloth taught an interdisciplinary design studio made up of students from all three schools in the college: architecture, interior architecture, and landscape architecture. Facilitating the studio was Scottie McDaniel, adjunct assistant professor of landscape architecture, and Stephanie Carlisle, environmental researcher at KieranTimberlake and lecturer in urban ecology at PennDesign, shaped the discussion.
“I work with students to explore design agency at the interface of architecture, ecology, and materials,” said Faircloth, whose students are studying the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Cherokee National Forest and their relationships with the rivers, forests, and lakes that surround them. Their research is taking them into the national park for overnight camping trips, sessions with park officials, and investigation of the history and composition of the land.
The students proposed designs for three sites, including a Center for Ecological Interpretation and Land Use History, an extraction site for building materials, and a material processing site.
Previous BarberMcMurry professors have included Lawrence Scarpa of Brooks + Scarpa in Los Angeles in 2013 and Wendell Burnette of Wendell Burnette Architects in Phoenix in 2015.
