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Katherine Faulkner AIA, LEED AP, is a founding principal of NADAAA, overseeing firm operations, fabrication, and design on select projects. Since 2011, she has directed efforts to expand the firm's prototyping facilities and portfolio, extending NADAAA's geographic reach and capacity to deliver large projects.

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Katherine Faulkner AIA, LEED AP
Vice President of Design, Katerra
Women in Design Award of Excellence, 2017 winner

Katherine Faulkner 200119 Board Update 9

Celebrating the cross-laminated timber slab construction of RISD's new Residence Hall, NADLAB put in a bid to build the millwork for the common spaces using scrap CLT from the construction site. The spirit of iteration and collaboration that pervaded the entire project, fostered through Integrated Project Delivery, enabled a remarkable interior construction that leveraged the nexus of technology and craft.

Katherine Faulkner 200119 Board Update 8

Since at least the latter half of the twentieth century there's been a rumbling beneath the architectural profession that we have lost cultural relevance. The space between drawing and construction has become increasingly wide, with a web of variables and players, such that it is more common than not for a building to go up without much architecture at all. Notable efforts to close this gap have sponsored architectural schools of thought; Buckminster Fuller defined the consummate inventor-architect using technology to revolutionize construction while maintaining fidelity to craft. Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog took the strange craft-technology bedfellows even further, featuring a “back-to the land” sensibility alongside high-tech innovation.

Daniels Building at One Spadina Crescent

Image credit: Nic Lehoux

Katherine Faulkner 200119 Board Update 1

At the moment of its launch NADAAA began investing in tools for prototyping—both analog and digital—in order to achieve goals for quality and address growing frustration with an inability to control the costs. Rather than labor on design documents that inevitably became less-excellent shop drawings, why not build it ourselves? As in-house construction projects grew in size, NADLAB was created as the means to manage fit-out projects with more granularity, tracking labor, materials, schedule and logistics. Early projects were residential in scale: kitchen cabinets and loose furniture. Then interiors for retail clients, and most recently the furnishing of common spaces for RISD’s new residence hall. The learning curve has been incremental, with the greatest challenges being surface finishing and logistics. But the model continues to be a successful one, and arguably scalable to have a significant impact on how architects engage in project delivery.

Image credit: Nic Lehoux

Katherine Faulkner 200119 Board Update 4

Image credit: Nic Lehoux

Katherine Faulkner AIA, LEED AP (2017)

Biogrpahy