William W. Braham

William W. Braham, PhD, FAIA, is Andrew Gordon professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he previously served as department chair and chair of the Faculty Senate, and is currently director of the MSD in Environmental Building Design and of the Center for Environmental Building + Design.

He studied civil and mechanical engineering at Princeton before working as a solar consultant with the Princeton Energy Group. He initially came to Penn to work with Don Prowler and Harrison Fraker on a multi-year DOE research project, “Teaching Passive Design in Architecture.” After completing the Master of Architecture he worked in New York as an architect for nearly a decade, eventually returning to Penn as Director of the Center for Environmental Design and Planning, while completing a PhD in Architecture.

He has worked on energy and architecture for over 40 years as a designer, consultant, researcher, and author of numerous articles and books. His research projects have featured the application of systems ecology to the built environment and the uses of building performance modelling, spanning from considerations of urban morphology to the metabolic effects of responsive building envelopes. His recent consulting projects include energy and carbon plans for the City of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania Health System, Nakashima Woodworkers, and the Chautauqua Institution, and building energy modelling for the Daikin Open Innovation Lab, Silicon Valley. He has collaborated with many amazing colleagues, most recently Dorit Aviv’s Thermal Architecture Lab and Henning Larsen on radiant cooling innovations.