Marta H. Wisniewska

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

Wisniewska is a Lecturer and the Director of the 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 their production and testing, as well as familiarization and data collection.

Wisniewska is also a faculty fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and a member of the graduate faculty in the field of architecture.

Influenced by her experiences researching and teaching in different contexts such as Ethiopia, Singapore, Switzerland, Germany, and the United States, 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: Recovered Materials in Architecture and Construction (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.