Sandra Piesik is an award-winning architect, author and researcher specialising in technology development and transfer as well as the implementation of global sustainable legislation. She is the founder of 3 ideas Ltd and a Visiting Professor at the UCL Global Institute for Prosperity, initiator of several RD&D groups and consortia including HABITAT Coalition.
She is collaborating with the Paris Committee on Capacity Building of The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), CTCN, UNCCD, UN-HABITAT on The Guiding Principles for Urban-Rural Linkages for Advancing Integrated Territorial Development, The Global Centre on Adaptation (GCA) and the European Space Agency.
Her published work includes Arish: Palm-Leaf Architecture (Thames & Hudson 2012) and she is the general editor of the encyclopaedia, HABITAT: Vernacular Architecture for a Changing Planet (Thames & Hudson, Abrams Books, Flammarion, Editions Detail and Blume, 2017).

This encyclopaedia is the first contemporary global review of vernacular architecture carried out in the past twenty years. The culmination of years of specialist research, it gathers together an international team of more than one hundred and forty leading experts from fifty counties across a diverse range of disciplines to examine what the traditions of vernacular architecture, and its regional craftspeople around the world, can teach us about creating a more sustainable future.