Setting new standards for efficiency and design

LEED-Platinum Dublin Police & Fire Public Safety Complex, Winner of the American Public Works Association Structures Award

Designing with the beauty and power of nature for living things and living systems

Zero Net Energy Vacaville Transportation Center, a dignified place for the whole community

Pioneers in carbon neutral building

Indigo Headquarters, Zero Net Energy Workplace

Unifying art and architecture

Efficient buildings with unique beauty

Healthy places for all living things

Designed for people, animals and earth

Natural, renewable, resilient

A built environment for the 21st century

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

Zero Energy Living Building Challenge Award

USGBC Northern California Award for Innovation

AIA Central Valley Design Award

Solar Pioneer Award

American Public Works Association Structure of the Year Award

News

Blog

Featured

Inclusive Design: Making Spaces for Humans and Animals

Indigo is a leader in the growing movement for humane treatment of animals in our communities, and a frequent collaborator with the world’s leading expert on shelter-medicine design principles, UC Davis’ Koret Shelter Medicine program. Our shelters have a very low-carbon profile and use much less water and energy to operate.

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Gratitude for The Sun at The Winter Solstice

We are grateful and eager to be witnessing the end of the fossil fuel era and the beginning of a new phase of human reliance on clean, renewable energy from sun, wind and the stabilizing, radiant qualities of thermal mass stored in water, earth and other materials.

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Evolving the Built Environment to Serve People & Planet

We believe that the work of architects is to design a built environment that serves people and planet. Architecture in practice is not always about originating sleek new designs. It’s also about adapting our existing built environment, and the codes that shape that environment, so that it serves the evolving needs of our society.

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Contributing to a Resilient Built Environment Around the World

Reflecting on the role that the built environment plays in both mitigating climate change and fostering resilience in the face of extreme conditions.

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Carbon neutral before it was cool

We’ve been innovators in passive buildings since the 1970s. We wrote the first local energy saving-building code, which evolved into California’s Title-24 building code. Our headquarters in Davis, CA is the first ZNE office building in northern California.

Want to go Net Zero?

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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Fire Resilience

A new imperative for building in the West

Indigo’s Fire Resilient Buildings

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.

Learn More about Straw Bale →