Teresa Coady - Life and Career

Life and Career

Teresa Coady received her degree in Architecture in 1983 from the University of British Columbia. She is best known for her architectural work in the area of sustainability and energy-efficient design. In 1993, Teresa Coady and Tom Bunting founded Bunting Coady Architects; the practice was renamed in 2010 to B+H BuntingCoady Architects Inc. Coady completed two years of engineering and received a bachelor of fine arts prior to pursuing a masters degree in Architecture.

The statement “We create Living, Breathing Buildings”, which is trademarked by B+H BuntingCoady, developed from Coady’s master thesis entitled "The Living Breathing Building". Coady sites her thesis project "The Living Breathing Building" as the mechanism though which her architectural values came to light. While her thesis was initially rejected for being ‘not architectural’, the principles associated with the phrase “Living, Breathing Buildings” became the founding values upon which Bunting Coady Architects was initially created and upon which B+H BuntingCoady operates.

Coady believes that architecture is the means through which humans express cultural values and through which humans can prepare themselves for the future. The creation of architecture, for Coady, can have an enormous impact on the planet:

And if we do it well, we’ll succeed as a species. But if we continue to create mechanistic horrors around the planet, we’ll condemn ourselves to a very constrained future. —Teresa Coady, Achieving Business Excellence (April 2009)

In her opinion, the concept of “Living, Breathing Building” is synonymous with a move away from the notion that buildings should be built as machines for inhabitation and towards biomimetics (the art and science of using nature and natural systems as the source of inspiration for creating buildings and building systems). A “Living, Breathing Building”, according to Coady, is a building that imitates nature and enhances the environment.