Welcome to Future Talks by RTF, where we engage in inspiring conversations with the trailblazers who breathe life into design narratives. In our upcoming session, we are thrilled to host Andrew Micheler, a visionary in high-performance building design and material innovation since 1993. As the leader of Hyperlocal Workshop, Micheler has left an indelible mark on the architectural landscape.
Author of the groundbreaking book “Hyperlocalization of Architecture” (2015), Michler’s prowess extends to practical achievements. He successfully completed the first International Certified Passive House in Colorado, garnering multiple awards. Notably, his project Sol Coffee earned the A|N Best Small Spaces award, and his work, Temporal_Haus, was showcased at the prestigious ECC Venice Biennale.
Michler’s global influence extends beyond his projects; he is a sought-after keynote speaker, captivating audiences with his insights on Passive House and contemporary architecture. His commitment to fire resilience in design has earned him recognition on platforms such as PBS, NOVA, and NPR.
Join us as we delve into the future with Andrew Micheler, exploring the intersections of design, innovation, and sustainability.
RTF: Hi Andrew, We are glad to have you as a guest on Future Talks by RTF. Thanks for joining us. What has the journey focused on high-performance building design, building Hyperlocal Workshop, Sol Coffee and Passive House Rocky Mountains been like?
Andrew: It has been a totally unexpected adventure. At the turn of the century I wanted to be a part of this new environmental design movement in some way but found that it was heavy with rhetoric but not very robust. After professionally writing on sustainable architecture for a few years I discovered Passive House and the very results focused community that was also very open to sharing. That was the springboard to build my own passive house and eventually start a design firm that focuses on that process. Sol Coffee was inspired by my experience living off grid since 1996 and thinking about how micro businesses of the future will be much less brick and mortar and more mobile based. And of course to learn how to make a proper flat white.
RTF: Tell us about your book “Hyperlocalization of Architecture” and what it explores.
Andrew: During my time daily writing on design I found that I could often identify a contemporary building’s location based only on the design attributes, even when they has no conventional relationship with local vernacular. The book is the exploration of that phenomena of how architects are redefining and contextualizing very new ideas of sustainable design that are informed by time and place. I traveled to photograph the projects and visit with the architects in Japan, Australia, Spain, Cascadia, and Germany. Each chapter has a typology, for instance in Japan the focus is mico housing, and in Spain brise soleil on a commercial scale. It may sound dry but this was an extraordinary catalyst in the conversations, which are the core of the book, which go well into the idea of culture and modernity, sustainability, and their method of designing around the human experience.
RTF: What factors your design approach?
Andrew: I come from a fine arts and construction background and have no formal education in architecture so my approach may be a bit bespoke. All of our project begins with the physics of Passive House, so even if we do not certify we still use the energy modeling and methodology as a basis to work from. The design language in a colder region is simplifying the massing of the building and utlizing simple but expressive geometries. Windows can play a particularly sensitive role in how a building performs.
The other side is exploring local core attributes and the personalities of our clients and finding design seeds in those conditions. The project HA_ph in upstate New York is for two artist on a forested hillside. When visiting I was struck by the esthetic strength of the interior of a local covered bridge. I took that boxy form, and thinking of the tree abstractions of Piet Mondrian, modeled the windows as an abstraction of the surrounding verticality of the forest. That project is one interpretation of a hyperlocalization process, but it is typically more subtle.
RTF: What has been the most rewarding project? What made it so?
Andrew: My first passive house I built for myself in Colorado gave me the opportunity to take many more chances I would certainly not have had with a client’s project at the time. The house performs as it was promised, especially in winter. During COVID we rented it out for short term vacations, and having so many people stay there and share their personal experiences has been invaluable.
RTF: How important is it for material development and innovation teams and the architects to be on the same page to build materials that would aid the much-required and anticipated sustainable future?
Andrew: The way a building is put together is becoming more and more nuanced as our energy performance, durability, and carbon goals become more refined. I have become friends with many of the developers and retailers of products and systems we use. For instance I hosted Bjorn Kierulf, a passive house architect based in Slovakia. He developed the Ecococon straw panel and when I visited him in Slovaka I was genuinely impressed by how it filled so many of the roles we need in sustainable construction. We have a project ready to break ground which will be one of the first in the US to use the panels, andhope to see a factory in North America in the coming years to make it readily available in the market.
RTF: How do you approach the interplay of pragmatism and subjectivity in your designs?
Andrew: We typically get work for our ability to design to the passive house standard in house. The thing that motivates me though is the discovery process, the puzzle of designing in a conceptual context. I like to think each of our projects explores an idea of design that is new to us and hopefully relevant to salient issues of the built environment. The rest of the job is consolidating the conceptual framework with the precision of passive house performance conditions and other technical conditions, and when they come into conflict the budget and client use case will usually inform the answer.
We are working on a project in Crested Butte where the brief is to create rentals that can adapt for a much more mobile working generation in a place that has a chronic housing shortage. It accommodates both an office and easy accessibility for outdoor gear and workshop, and has a modular flexibility to change easily for a renter’s needs. This idea of trying to reduce the rigidity of the program and accommodate new generations of living and use is challenging.
RTF: What is your perspective on the evolving role of architectural criticism and the influence of architectural critics in the digital age?
Andrew: Digital media has been the critical tool in creating taste in architecture for the last 15 or so years. I felt like I was thrown into a design blender when I was writing for eVolo and Inhabitat. Due to the explosion of design personalities and complexity of how buildings now are put together it feels like critics are just trying to keep up, especially on a globalized stage. More than perhaps ever, we need voices which can add a subjective intelligence to what in architecture is important in how it works rather than how it looks. Design firms have become very savvy at creating public narratives of designs that may not hold up to their promise. This is chronically true when it comes to sustainability claims, where buildings are credited with achieving aspirations which do not pass even a perfunctory overview. I’d like to see critics have a better handle on basic building sciences and use that as a lens to question a firm’s claims.
I think we also need to find and cultivate younger talents like Kate Wagner and Oliver Wainwright, and look beyond the more defensive impulses of established critics, and a generation of taste informed by optics that seem to be targeted specifically to socal media or a narrow design/marketing narrative. I think the recontextualization of architecture, not in terms of fitting in, but in terms of providing guidance to living in the future of that specific place is what architects are best positioned to help explore and resolve and critics can really help guide that.
RTF: How do you look at the work beyond designing for young architects, such as the likes of involvement in publishing, handling media and building an online presence?
Andrew: Find a place you love to visit and document it. Make that into a project- like a film, book, blog, model, or some other type of media. It can be just for yourself, or to share. When I went back to Melbourne, a city that took up the last chapter of my book, I was fascinated by the stories the architects told me of the laneways. I spent a week filming them and made a little piece on the experience which I just hosted on my website.
Creating content is an active act of exploration, and I think invaluable to inform oneself on what and why they appriciate architecture. If you feel you have something particularly valuable, find ways to share it, to bring us into your adventure. I am less interested in a person’s CV than their observations of the built environment around them.
RTF: What would you suggest to the budding architects who await success in the field? What must be the mindset?
Andrew: It’s a very slow burn. Good design is as much as cultivating the right team around you and keeping everyone focused on results as it is being in a studio.
