What Experience Do You Want?

2022-05-23

"Don't bother. Nobody cares. Forget it," is what many of the longtime professionals working in solar energy said to Bryan Bowen, when he first graduated from Carnegie Mellon and was eager to begin a career in sustainable design. Today, he is Principal Architect at Caddis Collaborative, a multidisciplinary design firm in Boulder, Colorado which is dedicated to economic, social, and environmental sustainability. At Caddis, Bowen specializes in zero energy design, sustainable homes, and livable...

Bryan was first introduced to green building design early in life. Growing up in New Mexico, and living in a passive solar house, he helped his father build and plumb active hot air and water collectors. His conservation oriented lifestyle growing up influences his work today. Looking ahead to the future, he acknowledges one of the main problems facing efforts toward sustainable living in the West is land usage. Noting that as a collective, we are better off putting growth into existing towns as we can't keep expanding outward forever.

Tune into this week’s episode of Better Buildings, Better Society, as Bryan explains what he wishes more people knew about architecture, why it's so important for contractors to have a say early on in the housing design process, and why there needs to be a shift in our approach to designing living spaces, where we value experiences over things.

Quotes

• “The 101 we give people is that they need to know client-wise, is to design the house to be passively as conservation oriented as it possibly can be: windows, doors, envelope, everything. And then supply those minimized needs, but super efficient mechanical systems and after that,, supply that already minimized energy usage in demand with on site renewables if you can….and there ‘ya go - that’s the whole thing." (2:44-3:11 | Bryan)

• “A lot of people just don’t really know what we do at all. So, one thing as a result of the Marshall fire is we get a lot of phone calls from new folks and they are kind of stuck dealing with this problem that they're facing. They haven't spent a lot of time thinking about building a home or what we all do. And so, some of them are really having a hard time figuring out, 'Well, what does the architect do?' and 'Why do you have other engineers, aren't you the architect?' And well, no. We have different specializations. Mechanical engineers are doing a great job with the thing that they're doing. Structural engineers do a great job at the thing they're doing. We're the architects, we're doing a great job at the thing we're doing. Oh, and none of us are general contractors. You've gotta have a general contractor, unless you do a design build. So, really just getting people oriented has been a big effort there which has exposed to me a lot of things that people don’t know about our profession.” (16:59- 17:46 | Bryan)

• "You look at a final set of drawings, and it's like, 'OK, so you've got like 50 pages of drawings. Well, how long can it possibly take to sit down and draw 50 pages?' Well, that's not really the work. The work is all the stuff that leads up to those 50 pages being a really refined and clear set of instructions that builders can use to construct something that costs millions of dollars. And some folks seem to really value what we're doing. And other people focus on how cheap we can get this set of drawings and they don't know that you potentially lose out on quality when you do that." (19:21-20:00 | Bryan)

• “If you design a high maintenance energy-hog of a building, you’re not doing anybody any favors.” (26:10-26:15 | Bryan)

• “As Americans, we're consumer-focused people and we want to buy things. We tend to want to talk about things: 'I want this many sinks, or I want that many square feet, or I want this sort of thing.' And if you go with that, you generally end up with a big long laundry list of things, it's more than fits in a budget. We really try to reset the conversation to talk about experiences. (30:42-31:14 | Bryan)

• “We are building the world as architects and engineers, and contractors, right? So, we take that seriously and we have a long view of it.” (45:25-45:33 | Bryan)

• “It all comes back to the envelope.” (53:40-53:41 | Steven)

• “It’s important to know where you are spending your money in energy and then putting that on what you care about.” (57:12-57:15 | Bryan)

• “The work of the past doesn’t necessarily dictate the work of the future.” (1:04:50- 1:04:54 | Bryan)

Learn more about Bryan Bowen:

Website | https://caddispc.com/

Email | bryan@caddispc.com

Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/caddispc

LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/company/caddis-pc/

Learn more about Better Buildings, Better Society:

Website | https://www.dma-eng.com/

LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/company/dma-engineering/

Steven’s Personal LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-forrester-36a91517/