Bill Caplan

With an engineer’s understanding of sustainability, a passion for people-friendly building design, and a 34-year career in high-technology, Bill Caplan researched the built environment from a human and environmental perspective for more than a decade, contrasting designers’ claims with their ecological veracity. A sober look at the reality of our efforts to contain global warming and the public’s self-delusion about “green” and “sustainable” living inspired Bill to write Thwart Climate Change Now: Reducing Embodied Carbon Brick by Brick, published in 2021.

Mr. Caplan’s tenure at the multi-national instrumentation company he founded spanned high technology projects from the U.S. space and defense programs to decoding the human genome. Shifting focus to the built environment in 2006, he enrolled in Pratt Institute’s Graduate School of Architecture. He subsequently founded ShortList_0 Design Group LLC, seeking to promote an integrated design process to unify sustainable technology and architectural form. In 2016, he published Buildings Are for People: Human Ecological Design, a holistic approach to creating user- and community-friendly buildings that are sustainably designed. Contrast 21c: People & Places followed in 2018, a photographic essay about people and places in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam highlighting the disparities between rural and urban areas, and their struggles to adapt to a 21st-century environment.