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. Without a need to proclaim a signature style, Tres Birds is free to create the best outcomes.

The Tres Birds team is made up of progressive systems thinkers 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 to the surrounding ecosystem.

AN INTEGRATED TEAM
For our clients who prefer it, Tres Birds can both design and build projects. Each person on the core Tres Birds team is educated in architecture and has solid construction experience. This creates nimble and seamless management across all phases of the project, eliminating overlapping costs and providing one point of contact for the client, ensuring a smooth, consolidated process from start to finish.

A SUSTAINABLE APPROACH
We use sustainable and reclaimed materials wherever possible, and materials are always 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.

THE ART OF ARCHITECTURE
Art-making is central to the architecture work of Tres Birds. We work 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.




ABOUT MICHAEL M. MOORE // PRINCIPAL & FOUNDER

Michael M. Moore is the principal of Tres Birds, the innovative Denver architecture firm that has risen to prominence since he founded it in 2000. Known as visionary who seamlessly integrates architecture and art with environmentally-sound methods, Moore’s transformative work exemplifies his belief that architecture can create a better world.

Moore and his firm’s multidisciplinary design approach can be found in more than 100 projects ranging from mixed-use developments and corporate headquarters to net-zero energy homes and museums across the U.S. and internationally.

Consistently, Moore utilizes unexpected building materials to create dynamic results, often repurposing wood and metal into new and beautiful structures. His commitment to sustainability is broad and deep. “Utilizing energy from the sun and reducing fossil fuel use is the basis of everything we do. That’s why I started Tres Birds,” he says. “Every project is an opportunity to create symbiotic relationships between humans and natural systems.”

In addition to projects nationally and internationally, Moore has designed more than 35 buildings in Denver and 21 in Boulder. Moore’s firm is also uniquely equipped to build the projects it designs, due to his comprehensive knowledge of construction, which draws much appreciation from his clients.

Born in Milwaukee, Moore's career formally began at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied both environmental biology and fine art. With a desire to merge ecological systems science and modern design principles, he completed a Masters in Architecture at the University of Colorado Denver. Prior to beginning his firm, Moore was a project designer and manager at J. Logan Architects in Boulder.

Moore’s ability to blend exceptional design with positive social impact has caught the eye of city arts planners and museum curators. Moore works with Denver Public Arts helping to realize some of the city’s most outstanding public art projects, including RiNo Art Park. A prototype of his light-and-temperature-regulating terrace screens for his Lumina residential building in Denver was exhibited at the Denver Art Museum in The Light Show in 2020. Previously, the work of Tres Birds was presented at the Denver Art Museum in the exhibition Design Lab in 2012.

Moore’s work was recently featured in a new book: Building with Earth: Design and Technology of a Sustainable Architecture (Birkhauser, 2022). Projects by Tres Birds can also be found in Cool is Everywhere: New and Adaptive Design Across America (Abrams, 2020) by the internationally recognized photographer Michel Arnaud.