Michael Tavel & David Kahn

Michael Tavel and David Kahn have been a collaborative urban design, landscape, and architecture team for twenty years specializing in Sustainable Urbanism. They met while pursuing masters degrees in landscape and architecture at Berkeley in the mid 1980s, and each graduated with the top prize architectural design. The moved to Colorado in the early ‘90s to teach at the University of Colorado and pursued research in sustainable urbanism with emphasis on integrating storm water management into urban neighborhoods. They created a graduate level studyabroad program in Urban Design in Prague, Czech Republic in 1992 that ran until 2000 and worked with city officials and community members on complex infill and environmental planning projects. They have lectured in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and at numerousnational conferences on landscape architecture, architecture, and town planning.

Tavel and Kahn were part of a collaborative team that designed Solar Village Prospect, a mixed-use urbancomplex that opened in 2006 at the entrance to Prospect New Town in Longmont,Colorado. Breaking ground in 2009is the 25-acre, 280-unit, urban mixed-use Geos Neighborhood in Arvada,Colorado. Geos is expected to be America’s largest net-zero energy neighborhood. The design optimizes urban density with solar access,integrates stormwater management throughout its town plan, and utilizes high performance building systems. The project won a national honor award from the American Society of Landscape Architects.