Chrisna du Plessis
Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture, and Chair of the School for the Built Environment, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Chrisna du Plessis is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture, and Chair of the School for the Built Environment, University of Pretoria, South Africa. She holds graduate and post-graduate degrees in architecture and sustainable development from the University of Pretoria, a PhD from the University of Salford and an honorary doctorate from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Prof du Plessis is Board Member, Chair of the Programme Committee and Leader of the Priority Theme Sustainable Construction of the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction (CIB) and member of the International Standards Organisation working group on the resilience of buildings and civil engineering works. She has further served as a juror for the LafargeHolcim Foundation Sustainable Building Competition (MEA region, June 2011 & 2017) and European Solar Decathlon (2011 and 2014). With more than 20 years’ experience in sustainable human settlement development, both as practitioner and as researcher she has applied her focus on developing the principles and guiding frameworks for the practices of sustainable construction and human settlement development in a body of work that spanned the fields of housing, construction industry performance, urban/human settlement development and infrastructure design. Her current research concentrates on resilience and regenerative development and she recently published Designing for Hope: Pathways to regenerative sustainability outlining some of this thinking.
