Michael Tavel AIA, of SUN Studio in Denver, is a nationally recognized designer of sustainable urban neighborhoods and architecture. His firm’s work emphasizes passive design strategies within urban development patterns to reduce resource demands, and how urban architecture can be designed to best support a culture of sustainability.Their Geos Net-Zero Energy Mixed-Use Neighborhood won a 2009 National ASLA Honor Award, is featured on the national ASLA website, and was recently published in the 2014 Third Edition of "Sun, Wind & Light" from Wiley and 2012 "Zero Carbon Homes" from Routledge. Greensburg Green Neighborhoods and Solar Village at Prospect New Town are other recent award-winning projects. Tavel was keynote speaker at the 2011 AIA Vermont annual conference, featured speaker at the 2011 National ASLA Conference and the 2011 and 2013 Portland Urban Architecture Research Lab International Symposium and addressed the National AIA Convention in 2013. He has also spoken in Europe, Africa, and South America at government agencies and universities. Tavel was scholar in residence at the Zentrum Fur Keramic in Berlin for the month of July 2013. His book chapter, “The Culture of Green Neighborhoods,” was included in the 2016 “In Pursuit of a Living Architecture.”Tavel is an adjunct member of the faculty of Program in Environmental Design at the University of Colorado, Boulder where he has taught sustainable urbanism and urban residential architecture.