Steve Badanes
United States
Principal of Jersey Devil, Steve Badanes established one of the very first contemporary design-build practices, which he has continued now for forty peripatetic years. He is also involved in organizing several academic design-build programs around the United States, most recently for the University of Washington in Seattle and in Mexico. In both his practice and teaching, he has endeavored to continue the sense of urgency generated by the energy crisis of the early 1970s, and the impact this had on principles of architectural practice. He has also learned from and engaged local vernacular building practices where they offered alternatives to energy-expending technology, such as his use of the traditional “Cracker House” morphology to minimize or eliminate the need for air-conditioning in his Florida works. Badanes’s works indicate how, as he says, “small projects of high quality, far from the centers of media and culture, can have a positive impact on the larger society.” His work has exemplified the belief that “the profession needs to be more proactive”—in general, and, in particular, in addressing contemporary architecture’s failure to be sustainable in every meaning of the word.
