Beautiful, Responsive & Responsible

At Indigo, we believe that architecture has the power to put people in touch with their environment, each other, and their spiritual and cultural aspirations. Our mission is to express the beauty and power of nature through design.

From this commitment, we design buildings that passively extract energy from the environment around them ‒ natural light and warmth from the sun; natural ventilation; cooling from shade and breezes; and the energy-storing qualities of thermal mass. We serve our clients by working with natural forces to realize their vision, creating spaces that are inviting, comfortable, productive and inspiring.

A versatile architecture firm, we respond to the challenges and opportunities of today. We use our deep expertise in passive design to harness natural ventilation for clean, Covid-free air, to create fire resilient buildings and landscapes, and to make buildings that produce more energy than they use.

We are the original ZNE architects, with over 50 years in the field and winners of the Passive Solar Pioneer Award.

 
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Awards

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Zero Energy Living Building Challenge Award

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USGBC Northern California Award for Innovation

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AIA Central Valley Design Award

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Solar Pioneer Award

American Public Works Association Structure of the Year Award

 
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Natural Ventilation

How Fresh Air reduces transmission
of Covid-19

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, better ventilation makes for healthy occupants by reducing indoor concentration of viruses and other airborne contaminants. Many real estate developers believe that good indoor air quality will become an important selling-point for homes and offices in coming decades. At Indigo, we design buildings that improve indoor air quality through natural ventilation. Studies show that CO2 buildup makes us feel drowsy and unproductive, while fresh air helps us feel alert and alive. Since the global pandemic, we also know that fresh air can save lives by reducing the risk of airborne disease transmission.

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Humble and Beautiful

The timelessness of straw bale Buildings

Straw has been used as a building material for over 400 years. The building technique was further developed during the mid-19th century in the great plains region where timber was scarce and straw, an agricultural waste product, was found to be an inexpensive and extraordinarily insulative material. Indigo principal architect Jon Hammond built one of the first modern straw bale buildings in North America in the early 1980’s, a studio in the foothills of California’s Coast Range mountains. Since then, Indigo has led the way in bringing this local material into the mainstream of construction, using it for public safety buildings, animal shelters, landscape features, and their own adaptive-reuse office in Downtown Davis.