COTE Book Talk - Blue Architecture: Water, Design, and Environmental Futures
Join AIA Seattle COTE's first monthly meeting of 2025 for a book talk event with AIA COTE National!
A virtual conversation with author Brook Miller and reviewer Orrin Goldsby to discuss Brook’s book Blue Architecture: Water, Design, and Environmental Futures.
Use this link to register: Register for Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 890 0387 6245
Passcode: 636665
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“As architects and designers, we spend much of our time working to keep water out of building envelopes, ensuring it flows efficiently through pipes, and managing it in our cooling cycles. Despite all this, we rarely use water as a central design driver. It appears only as a necessary but unnoticed element: without much thought to its origin or destination, or our delight in it. In Blue Architecture, Muller picks up this gauntlet by offering a nuanced, beautifully written, and well-researched exploration of how water can be a more integral part of architectural design.”
These are the words of Orrin Goldsby, AIA, who reviewed Brook Muller’s book, Blue Architecture: Water, Design, and Environmental Futures (University of Texas, 2022) for COTE news. This event will include a book talk by Muller and an engaging discussion between Goldsby and Muller. Together they will explore Muller’s vision for a future in which we tap in to the creative force of water in architecture. Muller highlights various water crises and introduces decentralization as a potential response. He then expands his focus to both macro (watershed) and micro (building and site) scales, discussing how water shapes our environments. A water budget analysis tool is then introduced as a practical strategy that can further shape design decisions. Muller addresses the societal concentration of pollution as both a water-related challenge and a way to rethink solutions.
Brook Muller is Charles Eliot Chair in Ecological Planning, Policy, and Design at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine. His research and practice focus on design strategies that foreground water as a connective medium between landscapes and sustainable architectures and climate adaptive urban landscapes. Blue Architecture: Water, Design, and Environmental Futures (University of Texas Press, 2022), was an American Association of Publishers PROSE award finalist. He also wrote Ecology and the Architectural Imagination (Routledge, 2014). Brook collaborates with Cairo-based Megawra Built Environment Collective and served on the design team for the al-Khalifa Environment and Heritage Park, a project that intercepts groundwater causing damage to two thirteenth-century domes as the basis for the ongoing functioning of the park. Brook previously served as dean of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture and interim dean of the University of Oregon School of Architecture + Allied Arts.
Orrin Goldsby, AIA. LEED AP, BD+C, is an Associate with David Baker Architects (DBA) in the Bay Area. DBA is a nationally known, locally oriented architecture and urban design firm based in California and Alabama. Orrin grew up in the redwood forests of Northern California and brings his deep admiration of the complexity of the natural world to his design work to make resilient places for people. As a leader of DBA’s Site Ecology & Water working group, Orrin advocates for sustainable solutions in DBA’s architectural projects, enacting meaningful change at the nexus of affordable housing, climate, and community.
