Before Building Laboratory Receives 2025 UVA Sustainability Leadership Award
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The University of Virginia School of Architecture congratulates Assistant Professors Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann, directors of the Before Building Laboratory (BBL), on receiving a 2025 UVA Sustainability Leadership Award in the faculty category. As one of only two faculty honorees selected this year, MacDonald and Schumann were recognized for their innovative contributions to sustainability through teaching, research, and community engagement.
Presented by UVA’s Office for Sustainability, the Sustainability Leadership Awards honor individuals and groups at UVA and in the broader community who demonstrate exceptional commitment to environmental stewardship. “The nominees’ and winners’ individual and collective impacts are inspiring,” said Andrea Trimble, Director of the UVA Office for Sustainability. The awards align with UVA’s 2030 Sustainability Plan and celebrate those whose work reflects the University’s mission to be a good neighbor—locally and globally—and to build a better future.
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Through the Before Building Laboratory, MacDonald and Schumann lead pioneering research on carbon-sequestering building systems. Their work focuses on renewable material assemblies—particularly timber—as a strategy for addressing the built environment’s immense environmental footprint, which accounts for nearly 39% of global carbon emissions. Drawing on Virginia’s central location in the Southeastern wood basket, the lab advances mass timber construction through the development of structural systems and innovative fabrication tools, including a robotic CNC sawmill built in collaboration with UVA Engineering professor Gavin Garner and funded by the 3Cavaliers program.
MacDonald and Schumann bring distinct but complementary expertise to their shared leadership: MacDonald guides research on material cultural and the social dimensions of sustainability, while Schumann leads development in robotic construction technologies. Together, they synthesize their investigations through built prototypes, patents, publications, and public exhibitions. Their work has garnered national and international recognition, including a 2024 National Design Award from the American Institute of Architects, a 2022 Research & Development Award from Architect Magazine, and multiple accolades from The Architect’s Newspaper and the Society of American Registered Architects.
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| Examples of BBL's renewable material assemblies, clockwise from top left: Sylvan Scrapple at Exhibit Columbus: Public by Design (November 2023); Tangential Timber, constructed in 2022 and exhibited in "Material Acts" at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles (2024–2025); aerial view of Crinkle Cuts, commissioned for "Future View: Vernacular Technologies" at NJIT (2024); Sheets & Slabs testing chambers in UVA's Gilmer Hall used for psychological and neurological research on normative and biomaterial environments (May 2024). Photos courtesy Before Building Laboratory. | |
BBL’s expanding influence is reflected in its exhibition history. Their projects have been featured at Material Acts (2024-2025) at Craft Contemporary—part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative in Los Angeles—as well as in Future View: Vernacular Technologies (2024) at New Jersey Institute of Technology and the internationally recognized architectural biennial Exhibit Columbus (2023) in Indiana. Closer to home, BBL's 2024 Sheets & Slabs in UVA's Gilmer Hall served as testing chambers for a collaborative research project exploring the neurological effects of wood environments.
In addition to their research and design work, MacDonald and Schumann are deeply committed to education and collaboration. Since 2020, the BBL has employed 57 paid student researchers across disciplines and partnered with organizations like UVA Sawmilling and the student-led Society of Sustainability to repurpose campus waste materials for architectural coursework. The BBL also led the 2022 Biomaterial Building Exposition, a major initiative that brought together guest scholars, UVA students, and the community through five demonstration installations across Grounds, a J-Term course, and an exhibition.
With the 2025 Sustainability Leadership Award, MacDonald, Schumann, and the Before Building Laboratory are recognized for the vision, creativity, and care they bring to shaping a more sustainable built environment. They will be honored at a formal ceremony on May 2.
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