Prof. Felix Heisel presents the ‚Urban Mining and Recycling‘ (UMAR) Unit at the symposium take.build.repeat., held by the KIT Faculty of Architecture in November 2018. As one of the units at the NEST research building on the campus of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) in Dübendorf, Switzerland, the building design created by Werner Sobek with Dirk E. Hebel and Felix Heisel demonstrates how a responsible approach to dealing with our natural resources can go hand in hand with appealing architectural form.

Felix Heisel is an architect and academic working towards the systematic redesign of the built environment as a material depot of endless use and reconfiguration. At Cornell University, he holds the position of Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture and directs the Circular Construction Lab at Cornell AAP. He is a faculty fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, and a field member of the Department of Architecture as well as the Systems Engineering program. In Germany, Heisel is partner at 2hs architects and engineers, an office specialized in the development of circular prototypologies such as the UMAR unit as well as more recently the Mahr.WERT.Pavillon in Heilbronn. He has received various awards for his work and published numerous books and articles on the topic, including Addis Ababa: A Manifesto on African Progress (with Hebel, Wisniewska and Nash, Ruby Press, 2019), Cultivated Building Materials (with Hebel, Birkhäuser, 2017), Lessons of Informality (with Kifle, Birkhäuser, 2016) and Building from Waste (with Hebel and Wisniewska, 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; ETH Zürich, both in Switzerland and Singapore; and Harvard GSD.

Further information:
https://changelab.exchange/join/1-symposium/
http://ccl.aap.cornell.edu