concepts · updated 2026-08-10
Polly Cooper
confidence: low volatility: cold verified: 2026-08-10fresh
Architect who co-founded a passive-solar practice with Ken Haggard at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 1976 (later the San Luis Sustainability Group). Cal Poly Architecture faculty 1974-2002 (emerita). Co-recipient of the 1996 ASES Passive Solar Pioneer Award and co-author of Fractal Architecture: Design for Sustainability (2006). Credited by David Bainbridge as likely having designed more water-wall homes than anyone else in the world.
M. Polly Cooper met Ken Haggard at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in 1975; together they established their architectural practice in 1976, later known as the San Luis Sustainability Group (SLSG). She served as Architecture faculty at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo from 1974 to 2002 and holds emerita status there — the strongest independently confirmed detail of her career.
Co-recipient with Haggard of the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) Passive Solar Pioneer Award, 1996. Co-designed, with Haggard, what is reportedly California’s first permitted straw-bale house. In 1993, their office and home were destroyed in a wildfire; they rebuilt with fire-resistant straw bale walls and earthen plaster (2-hour fire rating). The rebuilt studio incorporates both masonry and water Trombe walls. They purchased and restored a former trout farm property in 1980; the land now attracts Cal Poly endangered frog researchers.
Co-author with Haggard of Fractal Architecture: Design for Sustainability (BookSurge Publishing, 2006), and co-author (with Margot McDonald, Haggard, and Cathleen Corlett) of “Sustainable Environmental Design Education (SEDE): A Curriculum Model for Architects and Landscape Architects,” presented at the 28th National Passive Solar Conference (ASES, 2003) under the San Luis Obispo Sustainability Group affiliation. Also listed as a collaborator of David Bainbridge in the Cal Poly archival finding aid (OAC).
Water-wall practice
In A Water Wall Solar Design Manual, David A. Bainbridge credits Haggard and Cooper jointly as likely having “designed more water wall homes than anyone else in the world” — both in their own retrofit/straw-bale home and across 30+ years of practice, with thermal-performance evaluation support from Phil Niles and Bruce Maeda. This is the strongest independent claim about the scale of her passive-solar design work.
Very little independent record
Nearly every source frames her as “Haggard’s partner” rather than documenting her independently. She has no dedicated Wikipedia article (the “Polly Cooper” Wikipedia entry is an unrelated 18th-century Oneida historical figure), and the firm’s own site has no working individual bio page for her. Individual credit on specific built works mostly goes to the firm rather than to her by name, though the firm’s project page for the SLO Botanical Garden Education Center — a straw-bale passive-solar education building where “the building itself is the teaching tool” — attributes the design to “Ken Haggard & Polly Cooper” jointly (per a 2026 research digest; not independently re-verified). Education, birth date, and licensure status are not documented anywhere found.
See also
- Ken Haggard
- Harold Hay
- David A. Bainbridge
- Living Systems — contemporaneous California environmental design firm (Jonathan Hammond, 1973), a parallel practice in the same passive-solar milieu
- San Luis Sustainability Group — the practice Cooper co-founded with Haggard in 1976; over 300 buildings designed