AJ100 Sustainability Champion of the Year 2023 named

‘Very, very impressive’ is how one judge described Fallon. Selecting her from a strong shortlist after extended debate, the judges highlighted Fallon’s passionate and impactful advocacy both industry-wide and inside Architype. They particularly applauded her enthusiastic approach to engaging clients, colleagues, contractors, site operatives and students alike.

‘Every member of the construction industry should be a climate champion but it hasn’t quite happened yet,’ Fallon has said.

An AJ 40 under 40 winner in 2020, Fallon relocated to Scotland three years ago to help establish Architype’s Edinburgh office, a move she describes as seminal. The Scottish office is now 40-strong and responsible for 50 per cent of the practice’s fee income.

The judges admired the breadth of Fallon’s reach: influencing clients in Scotland’s political arena, knowledge-sharing within the 100-strong practice, and spreading Passivhaus knowledge on site through ‘toolbox talks’, which she developed and are now standard on all Architype projects.

Equally committed to educating the next generation of architects, Fallon contributed to an online Passivhaus design course that will soon be available to all RIBA-accredited Part 1 programmes. She is a compelling spokesperson for women as technically literate and informed in a male-dominated industry.

Riverside Primary School by Architype

Fallon’s achievements in 2022 include contributing to an ambitious energy metric for Scottish schools with mandatory whole-life carbon targets linked to capital funding, and developing a net zero methodology for Edinburgh’s public buildings based on 12 representative building types. She is also lobbying the Scottish government for a performance-based funding model for retrofit, which she says is common in Europe and should be adopted in Scotland.

In a year during which Fallon took part in 45 industry events, she says her proudest moment was delivering Scotland’s most airtight non-domestic building, Riverside Primary School.

Fallon describes herself as involved in ‘the deep end of sustainability’ since the outset of her career. This meant she never learned the ‘business as usual’ way of doing things. She sees herself as ‘frank and collaborative’; her goal is to empower others to bring about industry change.  A firm believer in a ‘no blame’ culture, she sees giving confidence and comfort to supply chains as the biggest challenge.

For Fallon, joining Architype seven years ago was ‘coming home to a family of equal mindsets’. During the practice’s recent rapid expansion, she took part in a small in-house working group to articulate company values. ‘Collective wisdom resonates with me because of our team,’ she says. ‘It’s the people I work with who enable me – both past and present.’

In addition to a passionate commitment to raising industry standards and leading exemplar projects, Fallon’s ability to inspire others – through contagious enthusiasm tempered with modesty – is what ultimately swayed the judges.

Among the other shortlisted champions, the judges singled out Asif Din’s Living Design framework at Perkins&Will as innovative and one to watch.