Author: Ken Webster

Felix Heisel is an architect working towards the systematic redesign of the built environment as a material depot in a continuous cycle of use and reconfiguration. He is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, where he directs the Circular Construction Lab. Heisel is one of the founding partners of the Circularity, Reuse, and Zero Waste Development (CR0WD) network in New York State, as well as a founding partner of 2hs Architekten und Ingenieur Part Gmb B Hebel Heisel Schlesier, Germany, an office specializing in the development of circular prototypologies. He has received various awards for his work and published numerous books and articles on the topic, including Urban Mining und kreislaufgerechtes Bauen (“Urban Mining and Circular Construction”) (Fraunhofer IRB, 2021, with Dirk E. Hebel), Cultivated Building Materials (Birkhäuser, 2017, with Dirk E. Hebel) and Building from Waste (Birkhäuser, 2014, with Dirk E. Hebel and Marta H. Wisniewska). Felix Heisel graduated from Berlin University of the Arts and has taught and researched at universities around the world, including the Berlage Institute, the Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction, and City Development, the Future Cities Laboratory, Singapore, ETH Zurich, and Harvard GSD. Dirk E. Hebel is Professor of Sustainable Construction and the Dean of the Department of Architecture at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany. He is the author of numerous book publications, including most recently Urban Mining und kreislaufgerechtes Bauen (“Urban Mining and Circular Construction”) (Fraunhofer IRB, 2021, with Felix Heisel). He is co-founder and partner of 2hs Architekten und Ingenieur Part-Gmb B Hebel Heisel Schlesier, practicing architecture with a focus on resource-respectful construction methods and materials. His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions worldwide, most recently in Plastic: Remaking our world, Vitra Design Museum Weil am Rhein (2022) and Environmental Hangover by Pedro Wirz (both with Nazanin Saeidi, Alireza Javadian, Sandra Böhm and Elena Boerman), Kunsthalle Basel (2022), as well as Sorge um den Bestand, BDA, Berlin and other venues (2020–). As Faculty Advisor together with Prof. Andreas Wagner, he won the first Solar Decathlon Competition 2022 held in Germany (Wuppertal) as part of the Roof KIT team (Regina Gebauer and Nicolas Carbonare). Ken Webster is a Visiting Fellow at Cranfield University and was formerly Head of Innovation at the Ellen Mac Arthur Foundation. His book The Circular Economy: A Wealth of Flows (Ellen Mac Arthur, 2nd edition 2017) relates the connections between systems thinking, economic and business opportunity and the transition to a circular economy. He is on the Club of Rome‘s Transformational Economics Commission and a contributing author to Earth For All (2022). He makes regular inputs to conferences, workshops and seminars around the world.