Biography
Felix Heisel is an 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 matter design computation. Heisel is a licensed architect in Germany and partner of 2hs Architekten und Ingenieur PartGmbB, an office specializing in the development of circular prototypologies.
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); Urban Mining und kreislaufgerechtes Bauen (Urban Mining and Circular Construction, Fraunhofer IRB, 2021); Cultivated Building Materials (Birkhäuser, 2017); and Building from Waste (Birkhäuser, 2014).
Heisel graduated from the Berlin University of the Arts and has been teaching and researching at universities around the world, including the Berlage Institute; the Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction, and City Developments; the Future Cities Laboratory Singapore; ETH Zürich; and Harvard GSD.
Research Interests
- Adaptive reuse
- Architectural design
- Alternative materials
- Circular economies
- Collaborative practice
- Housing
- Informal design
- Informality design
- Material practice
- Reuse and recycling
- Sustainability
- Urban Mining
- Urbanism