Opening a Path in Urban Design
By: Bryan Bowen My exposure to urban design began during my days as an architecture student at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh. I grew up in the New Mexican desert outside of sprawling Albuquerque, where urban design principles carry no sway. Our family’s passive solar home’s [...]
What We’re Reading: Rachel Recommends “The Color of Law”
When Rachel Baker, intern architect at Caddis Collaborative, was studying architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, she encountered a book that changed her thinking about housing in America. That book was Richard Rothstein’s 2017 volume, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. The Color [...]
What We’re Reading: Jésus Recommends 438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea
In 2012, Salvador Alvarenga, a fishing boat captain, and his crewmate were lost at sea. Though his crewmate died, Alvarenga survived until he washed ashore fourteen months later. Jonathan Franklin’s book, 438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea, tells Alvarenga’s amazing story of unparalleled resilience. Jésus [...]
A Very Merry Fly Through at CoHousing Houston
One of the standard services Caddis Collaborative provides when designing a new community is a “fly through.” A fly through video allows future residents to move through a fabrication of their community. They can imagine how they’ll move through the space, greet their neighbors, use the common house, and [...]
What We’re Reading: Stephen Recommends The Agony and the Ecstasy
Stephen Eckert, project architect at Caddis Collaborative, recently had the wonderful experience of traveling abroad for a year with his wife and two daughters. While they were traveling, they spent time in Italy, where Stephen saw many of Michelangelo’s works of art. So it was appropriate that Stephen would [...]
What We’re Reading: Kelly Recommends Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage
To identify her favorite book, Caddis Collaborative project architect Kelly Siu goes back to a book she read in her twenties: Alfred Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage. The book tells the true story of Ernest Shackleton’s failed 1914 expedition to Antarctica. Though Shackleton and his crew never made it [...]
Understanding a Housing Development Budget
For those contemplating forming a cohousing community as well as for groups well along the way to achieving this goal, the relationship between the sale prices of the homes and the mixed composition of the development budget can be confusing. This graphic is one you can use to understand [...]
Urban Cohousing: Eight Case Studies
When you think of cohousing, you might think of cohousing developments, ecovillages, and other intentional communities in rural environments. Historically, there have been a number of communities in rural areas – and new communities are still being built. But in light of the desire to conserve land, water, and energy, [...]
Memel, South Africa: What Else Can Happen When You’re Building Homes
In 2012, Caddis Collaborative was hired to design a cohousing project in Memel, South Africa, and cohousing-inspired dwellings in the nearby black township of Zamani. Bryan Bowen, principal and architect at Caddis, got right down to business. He traveled to Memel and Zamani several times and became immersed in [...]
What We’re Reading: Brandon Recommends “Point of Impact”
Stephen Hunter’s bestselling 1993 thriller, Point of Impact, is Caddis Collaborative job captain Brandon Farrand’s favorite book – one he has read quite a few times. The book’s main character, Bob Lee Swagger, is a retired U.S. Marines sniper who served in the Vietnam War. Swagger is one of [...]
Listening to Residents: Community Engagement as Part of Good Design
Good community engagement means drawing folks out to be heard – before putting pencil to paper. Using fun and effective tools in addition to lightly facilitated open dialogue yields great results. Each planning process differs, but here’s one recent example of Caddis’s approach to community engagement. For a project we’re [...]
Bryan Bowen Wins Green Building Leadership Award
Caddis Collaborative is delighted to announce that principal architect Bryan Bowen has won the Colorado Green Building Guild’s Leadership Initiative Award for 2019. The award is given to a CGBG member who has shown exceptional and noteworthy commitment to advancing the craft of green building and has led or encouraged [...]
Woodward Park City Featured in SketchUp Blog
Kelly Siu was recently interviewed by Michelle White at SketchUp to discuss how we used the program to model Woodward Park City. Some topic covered are: How our office uses SketchUp Incorporating the SketchUp model into a video to help foster good community engagement How SketchUp [...]
Woodward Park City
Update January 11, 2018: Woodward Park City, was approved unanimously Tuesday night by Summit County! The 52,000 SF year-round action sports recreation center and training facility will be built at Gorgoza Park, UT. Designed to accommodate people at all skill levels, Woodward Park City will include both indoor and outdoor [...]
Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center
Congratulations to Rocky Mountain Ecodharma Retreat Center on the unanimous approval by Boulder County Commissioners of their Limited Impact Special Review (LISR). This approval recognizes RMERC as the next of a natural progression of historic uses of Community Significance on a beautiful parcel of land off the Peak to Peak [...]
Affordable Housing: Radio Story with KGNU
KGNU, a community radio station for the Boulder area, recently talked to Bryan Bowen about the housing crisis in ski towns. Curious about some of the solutions to address affordable housing in places such as Aspen? Listen to the clip below!
Affordable Housing in Ski Towns and Possible Solutions
According to the latest market data, the median listing price for a home in Aspen, CO is just north of $1 million dollars. The median household income is $72,336 (meaning that the average home goes for about 14 years times the average annual salary!). Given the disparity between home value [...]
2015 AIA Architect of the Year: Bryan Bowen
Our Chapter of the American Institute of Architects has honored Bryan as the Architect of the year. Here are the comments from the awards ceremony: "Bryan is a founding partner of Caddis, PC, an innovative firm in Boulder, Colorado. Caddis is providing leadership on new ideas about housing and sustainability. [...]
Cohousing Featured on NPR
*The featured photograph was taken at Silver Sage Cohousing community located in the Holiday neighborhood in Boulder, CO. Cohousing is in the news! Morning Edition featured a story on cohousing on Feb. 16th, 2015; however, NPR left out all of the wonderful cohousing communities in the United States. [...]
Houzz Spotlights NZE Home
Our Fraser, CO Net Zero Energy home was featured on Houzz today. This project was a 5,232 sf year-round residence in an extremely harsh environment. Passive and active building technologies with real time monitoring devices; including, daylighting and passive solar heating and cooling strategies -- grid-tied and all electric, but uses no [...]
HUD Highlights Cinema Court
One of Caddis' many afforadable housing projects, Cinema Court was recently highlighted on HUD's website. * Cinema Court was completed before the firm name change, hence why Bryan Bowen Architects, p.c. is mentioned in the article. [Source: HUD User] Moab, Utah is the gateway to some of the most iconic [...]