Tres Birds

Tres Birds is a full-service planning, architecture and general contracting firm based in Denver, Colorado. Founded in 2000, Tres Birds creates dynamic designs for a better world―building sustainable communities, respecting nature, and sparking innovation.

Working across the disciplines of architecture, art, engineering, and science, Tres Birds’ transformative projects get to the core of what matters―beauty, timelessness, and consideration of biodiversity.

The Tres Birds team is made up of progressive systems thinkers and makers who create healthy and efficient spaces that reduce carbon footprints and bring joy to their inhabitants. With a belief that less is more, Tres Birds often repurposes humble regional materials leading to sustainable and affordable results. Innovative thinking results in singular solutions for multiple challenges.

Projects range from mixed-use developments and corporate headquarters to net-zero energy homes, museums, and city parks. Each one is designed to bring wellbeing to the people who spend time there and the surrounding ecosystem.

Tres Birds simplifies the building process; the same people who design are the same people who build. This creates nimble and seamless management across all phases of the project, eliminating overlapping costs and providing one point of responsibility for the client, ensuring a consolidated process from start to finish.

The team uses reclaimed materials wherever possible and materials are selected for their inherent structural integrity. The advantage to sourcing local and reclaimed is that it not only reduces material costs for the client, but it lowers the overall embodied energy of the project, adding rich sustainable value.

Art-making is central to the architecture work of Tres Birds, stemming from the belief that creativity is infinite and a necessary tool to transform any space into an inspiring place to be for building inhabitants. This view of creativity is extended to the use of materials, with the ability to reinvent discarded materials (or materials with low market value) into something new, beautiful and purposeful.

Michael M. Moore, Tres Birds principal and founder, is an artist who has chosen architecture as his primary medium. His career formally began at the University of California at Berkeley where he studied both environmental biology and fine art. With a desire to merge both ecological systems science and modern design principles, he completed a masters in architecture at the University of Colorado at Denver.