Up Close: Ryan Welch

By Amalia Gonsalves 

“My path is a bit circuitous and only in hindsight seems planned out,” says Baltimore native Ryan Welch. That meandering path eventually led him to his current role as Principal and Research Director at KieranTimberlake. 

Attending a Quaker high school with one of the few programs offering Russian, Welch was drawn to the language and culture. “My interest in architecture stemmed from a high school trip to Saint Petersburg, Russia, where I first encountered a built environment that was very different from what I was accustomed to.” The experience led him to pursue an internship with Baltimore-based architects Ziger/Snead, a job that he continued through college and beyond while pursuing other academic interests. “The great mentorship of the founding partners really developed my passion for architecture through practice.” 

Welch studied Russian and Chemistry at Amherst College: “I have an incredible debt of gratitude to the Amherst faculty, who taught not just subject matter but an approach to physical and quantitative reasoning that can very easily be translated to other disciplines.” His thesis work in spectroscopy, which was published this year, afforded Welch the opportunity to engage in physical prototyping — “actually building experimental apparatus.” It also led Welch to develop novel computational and visualization tools to solve specific analysis problems, an approach he leveraged in his studio work at Yale School of Architecture and later as a Building Performance Specialist when he joined KieranTimberlake’s Research Group in 2011. 

In this role, Welch contributed to several building and planning projects, and collaborated with fellow Research Group members on software products such as Roast, a customizable thermal comfort survey tool; and Tally, a life-cycle assessment (LCA) application that enables architects to quantify the environmental impacts of building materials. Currently, Welch serves as co-investigator on a research project funded by ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy), a federal Department of Energy program. In collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania’s Polyhedral Structures Lab at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design and others, their work is focused on the development of 3D-printed carbon-absorbing high-performance concrete building structures. 

When asked about how research applies to architectural practice, Welch emphasizes the importance of rigor in problem-solving: “The first point of design is forming a solid understanding of a problem and being able to articulate that problem in a dispassionate form.” His approach involves quantifying certain aspects of design while also addressing more subjective elements through research-based discussions.  

KieranTimberlake’s Research Group was established under Welch’s mentor and former Research Director Billie Faircloth. The goal was to bring together individuals with diverse subject matter expertise to work across disciplines and address challenges in the built environment. Group members split their time roughly 50/50 between project-related and proactive research. Their work covers a range of subject areas, including human experience and behavior, materials, building systems, ecology, and climate health. “That was a novel concept in 2011, but today a lot of firms have dedicated research staff. I see this as a really positive development — an acknowledgement that in order to move our industry forward, we have some critical topics that need addressing. Individual firms are often at the vanguard of that challenge.” 

Welch cites the development of Tally as a formative experience for the firm both technically and socially. “I think we were the first firm to really beat the drum on the need to investigate embodied carbon. For a long time, the role that building material supply chains and construction play in climate change was undervalued.” By bringing together expertise in architecture, software development, and life cycle assessment, their team sought to “take a niche discipline that was tailor made for large-scale industrial applications and make it accessible and economical for architects to conduct.” At the time of Tally’s release in 2013, there was no incentive or regulatory framework for embodied carbon accounting, so most early adopters were students in architecture, engineering, and environmental science programs. “We found we had a responsibility to offer educational training series: Now you have this tool, how do you use it? How do you interpret results?” Welch notes two key turning points in LCA adoption: the LEED v4’s credit for lifecycle impact reduction and the surge in carbon-reduction policies across all government levels. In 2021, KieranTimberlake donated Tally to Building Transparency with the aim of transitioning it to a free tool. They are collaborating on development of Tally 2.0. “We started Tally as a piece of advocacy. Our role has now shifted to a knowledge expert providing resources to a nonprofit that will benefit the larger architectural community.”  

Locally, KieranTimberlake’s Research Group teamed up with Centennial Parkside CDC, YouthBuild Philly Charter School, and sustainable developer New Ecology to secure funding provided by the U.S Department of Energy’s Building Upgrade Prize for developing energy retrofit initiatives. The Prize focuses on addressing systemic social and technical challenges facing building upgrades in underserved communities: “You need a workforce that is familiar with the newer technologies, and you need to address legitimate concerns about displacement, gentrification, and increased housing prices. This whole program is predicated on addressing those barriers, working closely with those communities to understand their particular concerns, and developing demonstration projects that can serve as catalysts.” 

Looking to the future, Welch identifies several areas that need further research, particularly in the realm of supply chain impacts. “An extension of our life cycle assessment work is understanding the impacts of supply chains, not just in terms of their global environmental impacts, but how they intersect locally or regionally with environmental justice issues and labor exploitation. We’re trying to understand how we can best minimize risk throughout supply chains, from building construction all the way back to raw material extraction and processing. This is a generational challenge, probably a 30-year problem to tackle, but we need to start committing resources to it as an industry.” 

AMALIA GONSALVES is a freelance writer, architectural designer, and associate at Perkins Eastman Architects. 

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Ryan Welch’s inquisitive mind and passion for hands-on solutions led him to his current role at one of Philadelphia’s top firms Photo: KieranTimberlake