2022 Faculty / Service Award Honoree

Hillary Brown FAIA is Professor Emerita of Architecture at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York (CCNY), City University of New York. Until 2021, she served a term as Program Director of the College’s interdisciplinary master’s program: Sustainability in the Urban Environment, developed with the Grove School of Engineering, Spitzer School of Architecture and CCNY’s Division of Science, and Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership. She was on the program’s Executive Committee for 13 years since joining Spitzer faculty.  

Her first book, Next Generation Infrastructure: Principles for Post Industrial Public Works (Island Press 2014) has been widely acclaimed. A subsequent book, Infrastructural Ecologies: Alternative Development Models for Emerging Economies, (MIT Press, 2017) reflects her research interest in circular models for infrastructure placement in developing nations.  

Hillary recently served for six years on the Board of Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment under the National Research Council of the National Academies. She is Senior Policy Advisor with the EU’s Ecologic Institute, a Senior Fellow with the CUNY Institute for Urban Systems, Affiliated Faculty with CUNY's Advanced Science Research Center, and was long connected with the Post Carbon Institute. She has served on the National and NYC Board of Directors of the U.S. Green Building Council. A 1999 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, she was a 2001 Robert Bosch Public Policy Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. For her leadership in sustainable buildings and infrastructure, Hillary was elected to the National Academy of Construction in 2019.

Hillary was a recipient of a Fall/Winter 2018 writing residency at the Bogliasco Foundation’s Villa dei Pini near Genoa, Italy. Earlier that fall and summer, she undertook a research project on the circular economy for rural town and bioregion resiliency and redevelopment while a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Kőszeg, Hungary. This project informs her ongoing focus on rural regeneration in the U.S. as a potential climate migration solution.

Brown’s consulting firm, New Civic Works, founded in 2001, has engaged public and institutional clients in greening facility and infrastructure capital programs. Clients have included the New York Power Authority, the State University of New York at Buffalo, Salt Lake City, Utah, and the City of New Haven. Increasingly her applied research addresses these issues in emerging economies as well.

As a former design director and Assistant Commissioner at New York City's Department of Design and Construction, Hillary founded its Office of Sustainable Design in 1996. She conceived and was co-author and managing editor of both the City of New York High Performance Building and Infrastructure Guidelines, as well as co-author of the U.S. Green Building Council’s State and Local Green Building Toolkit.

Hillary received her M. Arch at the Yale University School of Architecture and her B.A. at Oberlin College. She is a frequent speaker, moderator, and keynoter. She has given well over one hundred and fifty presentations, nationally and internationally, over the last 30 years.