Bruce Coldham, FAIA
Principal Emeritus
Bruce Coldham, the founding Principal of C&H, retired in 2015 with over 35 years of experience in the practice of architecture in the US and Australia. He remains active within the profession and is pursuing his love of travel and drawing. Throughout his career, his dedication to ecologically sustainable design and cohousing were well known. His environmental design research in the M.E.D. program at the Yale University School of Architecture resulted in “Design Strategies for Sustainable Communities”.
Bruce has considerable experience as a designer and manager of both large and small scale, public and private sector architectural projects. He has experience in environmental design research, having developed a particular expertise in energy-efficient / bio-climatic design, and ecologically benign construction and land-use practices. Bruce has been an active participant and presenter at many regional, national, and international conferences on these subjects as well as a guest lecturer and visiting critic at a number of architectural schools including UMass, MIT, Yale, and RPI.
In 2003 Bruce became a member of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NESEA) Board, and became Board Chair in June of 2005.
Bruce is an advocate of non-profit community development, promoting and administering sweat-equity and participatory design programs in schools and low-income housing districts. He founded the London-based community design center Neighborhood Use for Buildings and Space (NUBS) in 1974, and the Australian Architects-in-Schools project in Melbourne 1979. Bruce also founded waste material re-use projects — channeling valuable waste into schools for art and craft supplies — in Melbourne (Reverse Garbage Truck) in 1973 and in London (London Scrap Project) in 1977.
For many years, Bruce has been promoting the benefits of “CoHousing”— a clustered, resident-developed style of housing with shared common facilities. In 1994, Pine Street CoHousing, of which he was founder and architect, became the first such project completed in the eastern US.