#015: Designing Shared Spaces with Bryan Bowen

We're kicking off Season 2 with a pair of episodes about Placemaking, how we design and consider creating environments for healthy thriving humans. In this first episode I talk with Bryan Bowen about the ins and outs of designing sustainable spaces for healthy, connected, thriving humans from a design perspective.

Bryan Bowen is an architect, cohousing nerd, and sustainable community-based designer. Bryan grew up in a passive solar home in an artists’ community at the foothills of the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA with minors in art and anthropology, and has been a practicing architect for almost 25 years. He lived in Wild Sage Cohousing in Boulder, Colorado, with his wife and two boys for 18 years. Bryan loved life in cohousing and enjoys the simple benefits of community – friends right outside the front door, casual interactions, great food, and a rich life for his kiddos. His firm, Caddis, is a 20 year old multidisciplinary design collaborative that explores how we may live more lightly upon our earth in beautiful and healthy environments.  Caddis has become a well-respected national cohousing expert, creating beautiful, innovative, highly functioning communities. Bryan has served on the City of Boulder’s Planning Board, the board of CohoUS, and now sits on the board of Better Boulder.

Some references from the show:

James Rojas - Urban planner

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America -Book on zoning by Richard Rothstein

Superbia - Book on designing better neighborhoods by David Wann

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Caddis Collaborative - caddispc.com

CohoUS - www.cohousing.org

Communities Magazine - gen-us.net/subscribe