AIA Denver COTE Forum: Community Based Design-Build Projects

Friday, November 5th from 11:30 to 1:00

Location: University of Colorado at Denver , Room 480
1250 14th St ., Denver , CO 80202

Lecture by Rick Sommerfeld on community-based design-build projects including DesignBuildBLUFF.

Rick Sommerfeld is the Associate Chair and Senior Instructor at the University of Colorado 's College of Architecture and Planning.  In addition, he leads the College's design / build studio that has long focused on community based design projects.  The College and studio has recently partnered with Design Build BLUFF to build a home on the Navajo Reservation in Utah .

Rick holds an M.Arch from the University of Colorado Denver , and a Bachelor of Environmental Design degree from the University of Colorado at Boulder . Rick currently teaches architecture courses at the University of Colorado , College of Architecture and Planning, focusing on green design and construction as well as computer design and architectural graphics. He was selected by faculty and students as the college's "Instructor of the Year" for 2003 and again in 2005. He also holds the college's "Outstanding Graduate Award" for 2001 and was the American Institute of Architect's "AIA Master's Candidate Medal Winner" for 2001. Rick was a Faculty Advisor for the CU 2005 National Solar Decathlon team. His student’s “green” fabrication work has been shown at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and Design Within Reach Studio in Boulder . Rick's professional design practice, the3rdspace in Denver , specializes in innovative residential and small commercial design.

UCD Design-Build Program

Over the past three years the design-build program at UCD has been overseen by Rob Pyatt and Rick Sommerfeld, both are graduates of the "Glenn Murcutt International Master Class". The presentation will cover what they learned at the Murcutt Master Class and how that has influenced the design-build projects at UCD.
The Murcutt Master Class is an intensive summer program lead by tutors Glenn Murcutt, Richard Leplastrier, Peter Stutchbury, and Brit Andersen. Every year 30 architects, professors, and graduate students from around the world are selected to participate in design problem that thoroughly considers program in relationship to the context and the Australian landscape. Participants live in residence with the tutors and over the duration of the class design and present their ideas. On weekends, in order to understand architecture at a deeper level, tutors take the participants to projects that they are working on or have completed to explain their design philosophy.
The design-build program at UCD is interested in community-based design problems that allow students to consider the social, environmental and economic impacts of their architecture. Through hands on interactions with clients, and construction students learn to understand the significance their design decisions have in the world. Two of the programs most recent projects are the interior renovation of the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and a $50,000 house for a Navajo family in Bluff, UT.

Cost: Free for members/$20 for nonmembers
Credit: 1.0 HSW/SD

Contact Jenna Cather to rsvp
jenna@aiacolorado.org

Downtown Denver Morning in Fall

Time to wax poetic.  One of my favorite parts of the day, and year, is the morning in fall in Downtown Denver.  I would say that I am a morning person now, implying that I wasn't always so.  My walk to work (after a short light-rail ride)is from Union Station, to Writers Square, about 4 blocks.  A stop at the Tattered Cover Bookstore for a coffee, and a quiet stroll down 16th st; well, relatively quiet.  There are of course many other people on their way to work, or wherever else they may be going.  The fall chill is blowing through the downtown streets, and everyone is hustling and bustling, but mostly to themselves.  It is a calm energy, but an energy nonetheless.  Walking from Union Station eastward also implies a direction in time.  From the historic buildings in lower downtown (LoDo), to the 1980's glass and steel oil-funded skyscrapers further east.  The gradient of energy increases with the gradient in building types. The planters on the mall are being prepared for the harsher weather ahead.   The homeless are selling copies of the Voice newspaper,  the regional buses are roaring in and out of Market Street Station, and my coffee from the Tattered Cover is delightfully warming my hands.  While my walk visually continues on, my body stops short of the 1980's skyscraper wonderland.  My destination is Writers Square, a peculiar piece of Urban Design.  As a designer, we try to create and enhance experiences like these, but one must wonder if these experiences are a result of calculated environmental design, or a confluence of many other factors that, try as we might, we just can't control?