Marta H. Wisniewska

Marta H. Wisniewska is an architect and urban planner whose research and teaching promotes alternative building materials and investigates their applications in local building sectors in developed and developing territories.

Wisniewska is Adjunct Assistant Professor in Architecture at GSAPP Columbia. She is also Lecturer and the Director of Regenerative Architecture Lab at Cornell AAP. The lab is primarily a space for research and hands-on experimentation with cultivated and regenerative alternative building materials that positively impact the natural environment as well as the health of users, manufacturers, and builders. The lab supports the production and testing of alternative materials as well as familiarization and data collection.

Influenced by her experiences researching and teaching in different contexts such as Ethiopia, Singapore, Switzerland, Germany, and the USA, she aims to activate new and alternative resources for unique and context-specific applications, aspiring to widen the architectural palette and support a circular economy paradigm for the building industry.

Wisniewska’s work has been published in several books such as Building from Waste (Birkhäuser, 2014); Addis Ababa: a Manifesto on African Progress (Ruby Press, 2018); and City in Your Hands, ETH Zurich (2019). She holds an M.Sc. in Architecture and Urban Planning from ZUT Szczecin, Poland.