The stock of housing we have right now in America, most of it uses way more energy than
it needs to, doesn't feel very good, and a lot of times they're toxic the way they're
operating with their HVAC systems or the materiality and it's off-gassing.
And I expect more, and it's pretty easy.
We've got the, just utilizing creativity and utilizing science, so we've got the statistics
out there.
We have the energy analysis of every material.
We can digitally analyze anything we can create right now for energy performance.
So we have all these tools that allow just a few people, architect, builder, artists,
get together and make these things.
They make very high performance and humanistic spaces.
It's like really bringing the art and the science together.
The art being, making things that are beautiful and feel very good and genuine to be in.
I'm Mike Moore, founder of Tracebirds Workshop.
We are an architecture and building company.
I believe that all animate and inanimate beings are interconnected, that the health
of one increases the health of the other.
So what we're doing with our buildings is, number one, we're letting the sun back in.
So we're taking away materials from these existing buildings and replacing them with
modern, transparent, insulative materials.
And really just overall manipulating the structure and the heating and cooling and the
apertures to outside to make buildings that are very healthy for their inhabitants.
Most of our cities are filled with buildings that aren't being used or buildings that have
very high operating energy because of antiquated systems and buildings that are unhealthy because
there is no daylight and air movement in the building is poor.
We believe using the existing infrastructure is important because we can dramatically lower
the embodied energy of the active architecture and general contracting by using things that
are already here.
And to me, high embodied energy equals global warming, equals more species extinction, equals
deforestation.
By us using a material that's just sitting there, that's regional, and using it to create
structure for one of our buildings or create floor systems or roof systems or the architecture,
we can bring that embodied energy down so narrow.
And really we're doing it through the concept of let's use things from our region, let's
use things that have little to no market value, and let's use things that are beautiful in
repetition and using design and composition with those.
There's sort of a big population right now of designers who've had a similar experience.
Sort of in our generation, things really like creatively progressing and using design
just to follow what this flow everyone's desiring, like a very clean flow doing something that
is effortless.
And it's definitely influenced how I'm looking at making buildings and making spaces for
people because I'm sort of doing that same analysis of all of our materials that we have
available to us, and like how do we start bringing them together different to progress
these spaces and how they perform.
So when we have a project, we're going to try to accomplish that function and that experience
we're trying to give the client or the guest, and we're going to minimize the amount of
materials and minimize the amount of moves to get the light right and to give the specific
experience that we're intending.
A big part of this is respecting that existing building and respecting how it was built and
what the intentions were and what the datums are of it, and really respecting that fundamentally
and then moving from there with our design.
We're always trying to reveal the truth about the building, what it's actually made out of,
how it's held up, its genuine personality.
We're also through science and are giving people an experience of natural cycles, whether
that be the sun or weather patterns or vegetation outside and its growth cycles.
Always continually connecting through our design, connecting people back to those core
things.
We are always looking to use reclaimed materials from our region.
So we have professional scavengers that we work with.
We all at the workshop look for things and research things for projects.
Oftentimes other colleagues of ours who know what we're up to appoint us in the direction
of a material that's become available in the region.
And always these materials had a previous life.
So they had a use, let's say, a bowling alley lane.
It was used for entertainment for 60 years.
We're not a business and then we're taking that and making, you know, a business.
Making, you know, a front door to a photography studio or conference room tables for an ad
agency or an atrium stair core in the middle of a downtown Denver building made out of
that material.
People have been reclaiming materials from their region to make things forever.
I believe what we're doing is we're using very intentional design to bring these materials
into the infrastructure of the project, the overall structure through all systems, you
know, of the building.
I like being around these objects.
The energy of them feels very positive and vibrant.
I think of them and I feel these materials as animate, so living.
And I think that through design and through re-contextualizing these materials, we're
breathing this energy, we're putting new energy, we're collaborating with its existing energy
and it becomes sort of exponential, I feel like.
That expansiveness that's felt in natural places, it's a similar feeling I get to
when materials are reclaimed and re-contextualized.
There's a similar energy to it.
Maybe these materials are reclaimed and we re-contextualize them and use through design.
It's almost like they're a proof of that expansiveness for me.
I believe that through creativity and design, we can make anything beautiful.
Beauty isn't the material sitting in fallow in a warehouse.
Beauty is when you start using repetition and function and purpose and light and shadow
and make these give new life to these materials and give them a reason to be in this world
again and that energy you feel when you're in the spaces.
And it's very positive and it feels progressive and it feels right to me.
I think that's it.
Thank you.
