KieranTimberlake is an American architecture firm based in Philadelphia. Since its founding in 1984, it has focused on sustainability, including research that it has used to develop new building technologies and products. Its projects include the planning and design of new structures, and the renovation and transformation of existing buildings. The firm has received many national and international awards for its work.

History

Founders Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake met while they were architecture students at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-1970s. Their architecture professor Steven Izenour introduced them to architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and the pair went to work at Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates, the firm where Izenour was also employed. In 1980, Kieran won the Rome Prize, which included a year-long fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. In 1982, Timberlake also won the Rome Prize and was awarded a year-long fellowship. In 1984, Kieran, Timberlake, and structural engineer Sam Harris, established KieranTimberlake. The firm was initially headquartered in Kieran's Powelton Village house. Their first projects included a new building for Kieran's father's car dealership and a jewelry store. The firm's first big project came in 1986 when they were commissioned to design a campus community center at Chestnut Hill College. KieranTimberlake was then commissioned for a project at Bryn Mawr College's Shipley School complex. Harris later left KieranTimberlake in the 1990s to run his own practice. In 2001, James Timberlake and Stephen Kieran won the Benjamin Henry Latrobe award from the Fellow of the American Institute of Architects which came with $50,000. Timberlake and Kieran used the earnings to write a book titled Refabricating Architecture. The book was published in 2003, and as of 2011, had sold 13,000 copies. In 2002, Princeton Architectural Press published Manual: The Architecture of KieranTimberlake, which presents a technical look at the firm's architectural practices. By 2002, the firm had 50 employees. In 2003, the firm installed the first actively ventilated curtain wall in North America at the University of Pennsylvania's Levine Hall. Also in 2003, KieranTimberlake built a pavilion featuring the firm's Smartwrap technology at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. In 2008, KieranTimberlake's Cellophane House was selected to appear at the Museum of Modern Art's Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling exhibition. The building was selected for the MoMA's exhibit due to its modular design, use of sustainable building practices, and SmartWrap. In February 2010, KieranTimberlake won the commission for the new Embassy of the United States, London. In January 2018, the new embassy building in London opened. In 2015, Kieran and Timberlake authored Alluvium: Dhaka, Bangladesh, in the Crossroads of Water, a book investigating housing and climate change in Bangladesh. The book was inspired by the graduate architecture research studio the pair taught at the University of Pennsylvania, which included a trip to Bangladesh. By January 2016, KieranTimberlake had moved its headquarters to a 63,000-square-foot former bottling plant for Henry F. Ortlieb’s Brewing Co., now Christian Schmidt Brewing Company, in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia and has 100 employees.

Research and development

The firm has conducted research studies on carbon reduction and sustainability which have led to the development of new building technologies and products. One such product is customizable plastic walls called SmartWrap that cover conventional walls and provide insulation, heat, power, and light. SmartWrap is a proprietary system consisting of layers of transparent PET plastic that incorporates ultrathin photovoltaic cells that gather solar energy, coupled with flat chemical batteries to store it. It was developed (in coordination with ILC Dover and DuPont) while teaching at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, and debuted at a "SmartWrap" pavilion erected at the Cooper-Hewitt in 2003. In 2013, KieranTimberlake developed Pointelist, a wireless sensor network. Later in 2013, KieranTimberlake developed Tally, a life cycle assessment software plug-in for the building information modeling software Autodesk Revit. KieranTimberlake gifted Tally to the nonprofit organization Building Transparency in 2021, making Tally free and open access. In 2018, the firm published the app Roast, which surveys users to assess building comfort by recording perceived temperatures, brightness, and noise levels. Development of the app began when the firm moved into a former beer bottling plant in the summer of 2015.

Selected projects

Selected awards

Publications