Institute for Ethical and Civic Engagement

University of Colorado Design Build
(Architectural Record)

From its two Solar Decathlon wins to its innovative TrailerWrap projects to its current work with Habitat for Humanity, the University of Colorado's (CU) College of Architecture and Planning design-build program on campuses in Boulder and Denver has been educating students for 11 years with small-scale, hands-on projects that provide architectural solutions focusing on community outreach and service learning. The projects, and programs, have lasting effects on both the students and the community, as demonstrated by CU's latest completed project for Urban Hens.

Urban Hens, developed in Boulder, was the brainchild of Wynn Martens and Jeanne McDonald, of CU's Children, Youth, and Environments Center for Research and Design. They came to CU architecture instructor Rob Pyatt, Assoc. AIA, and asked him to help them build a modern, urban hen house. The idea was to use raising chickens as a way to promote healthy living, community building, and environmental sustainability. Pyatt, with assistant professor of architecture Matt Jelacic and associate chair of CU's architecture department Rick Sommerfeld as advisers, took on the project as an independent study program with six environmental-design students (15 additional students were involved in the construction). “The Urban Hens project has been great fun,” says Pyatt. “Many of my colleagues laughed at me for taking it on, but I loved the simplicity of it and the fact that to really design an urban coop you needed to understand the complex systems at work. We spent a lot of time diagramming and discussing the larger food issues, the slow-foods movement, dynamics of poverty and food, and how it all fits into our local culture. Climate issues and the durability of materials, hen health and maintenance, predator protection, the human-hen interface, the garden and compost — and linking that to the kitchen — all became part of the project.” Says Sommerfeld, “This project wouldn't have been successful if we couldn't have made it affordable. Rather than a single structure where all materials are donated, it solves the problem of how a human can interact with a sustainable food source in an affordable, repeatable project.”

Designed to house four to six chickens and withstand 139-mile-per-hour winds and Colorado snow loads, the coops, based on quonset huts, are constructed of an enclosed, arched, 9-foot-tall, corrugated-metal structure. Horizontal wood slats provide shade and ventilation, and a sand floor enables easy cleaning. Three coops were constructed, one in a community garden, one in an assisted living home, and one in Pyatt's backyard. The project didn't end there, though. Two students, Jeffrey Troutman and Dustin Buck, have taken the coops to the next level, designing a sleek, prefabricated version that can come in a flat pack and be sold at farmer's markets. The prototype was featured in a recent exhibition at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, and six of the flat-pack coops are being produced in the next month. “We want these projects to encourage architecture students to go on to do more than just be good architects,” says Jelacic. “We want them to be business leaders as well.” 

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