Katharina Kral is a licensed architect, researcher, and educator examining the intersections of well-being, occupant satisfaction and emerging material technologies. Her work challenges the status-quo of housing design and retrofitting by exploring concepts and methods for the development of sustainable, adaptive, inclusive, and affordable living environments. She is a Lecturer at Cornell AAP | Architecture, where she directs the Housing Innovation Lab. She is also a Faculty Fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, and a member of the Graduate Field of Architecture.
Prior to teaching at Cornell, Katharina led the development of large-scale housing projects for Buchner Bründler Architekten in Switzerland. Driven by her experience in practice, she started investigating building performance evaluation and linking architectural quality, occupant satisfaction, and well-being with quantifiable stakeholder benefits. Her work aims to empower architects to make more informed design decisions and to contribute to the mitigation of global societal challenges like climate change, urbanization, social inequalities, and the housing crisis.
340H E. Sibley Hall
kmk334@cornell.edu