BEN’s GRADUATE STORY
NAME: Ben Bowman
FROM: Massachusetts
PROGRAM: Sustainable Building & Design
I found Endeavour at a time when I was recently enchanted with Permaculture but not finding a lot of career opportunities in sustainable agriculture. I hoped to learn a type of construction that would match the creativity, beauty, design rigor, elegant solutions, and ecological salvation that I found so dear to Permaculture. I couldn’t have gone to a better place.
By considering building challenges holistically and by exploring solutions with curiosity and open minds, the Endeavour team builds homes, offices, and community buildings that combine some astonishingly rudimentary materials with state of the art technology. Year after year, they dream up beautiful and elegant design innovations that challenge the conventional wisdom about what constitutes a respectable design approach and, more broadly, about the role that the construction industry can play in the struggle for climate stabilization. And because of this, as students, we learned not only from the building project that we undertook, but by visiting and studying their back catalog of building projects. By the end of our program, Endeavour had introduced me, in the classroom and in the field, to a palette of possibilities that most master builders couldn’t shake a stick at.
I now work as a project manager with East Branch Homes, a residential construction company in western Massachusetts. My experience with Endeavour has positioned me to succeed in both the field and the office – a versatility that goes a long way in residential construction. And on a broader level, when turning our industry around proves to be a slow and arduous task (as it all too often does), I can draw from a deep well of confidence that better buildings really are possible, and that they are worth the fight.