So St. Louis just held its first ever PechaKucha night and it was a lot of fun. More than 250 people packed the Foundation.  But I will get back to that in a minute…

What I really want to share is what’s happening next, because it’s ambitious and everyone who has a PechaKucha night in their city needs to come out and support the cause.  February 20th will be a worldwide wave of PK celebrations to support Architecture for Humanity’s rebuilding of Haiti relief efforts.  This is evolving quickly and I will post more updates as plan solidify.  For now,  click here to learn more.

Now, back to PK STL 01…Stone foundation, exposed pipes …

The week ahead will mark the start of a monumental process here in St. Louis as Stage One results are announced for the International Design Competition on Gateway Arch.  For those of you familiar with St. Louis, you know that as astonishing as the Eero Saarinen designed Arch is, its connection with the city and the river is largely fragmented.  You currently have to play frogger over an interstate in order to get the Arch grounds.  And so for the first time in 50 years the National Park Service is revisiting the design with a competition, intending to award “the best from the best” with a commission to build an intervention that …

First, let me get this out there: I HATE MUSHROOMS.  I think they are gross – gross to touch, gross to smell, gross to eat. Gross.   My distaste for mushrooms probably harkens back to when I was a toddler and ate a toadstool out of the yard, causing my parents to rush me to the hospital to have my stomach pumped.  This distaste grew as I attended St. Mark’s High School in Wilmington, DE where frequently on cool windy days, the smells of the Pennsylvania mushroom farms wafted across the campus (according to UC Davis, PA produces 44% of the US’s mushrooms). The hatred was cemented at the University of …

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while now, but what better time to do it than Super Bowl week!

This is a Super Bowl commercial from a few years ago, put on by Reebok. It’s the story of a CEO of a company hiring an ‘office linebacker’ (Terry Tate) to scare employees into being prodcutive and doing the right thing.

Personally, my favorite part  is when the guy is intimidated (mind games) into throwing the the can into the recycling bin. Luckily, we dont have to police that much around here though. We got some pretty responsible ‘greenies’ in the Atlanta office.

There are more than just this one, see them all HERE. …

It was recently announced that  the Salvador Dali Museum has received the Novum Design Excellence Award within the Specialty Clad Structure Category.

A design objective was to protect the most significant collection of Salvador Dali’s art while creating a new museum with iconic presence. The museum is currently under construction and has more than 900 triangular shaped pieces of glass that make up what is called “the Igloo” at about 45′ tall and “the Enigma”  which is more than 75″ tall.  Each piece of glass is different within the Novum structure that overlooks the water at the St. Petersburg, Florida site.

World, meet Marta.  She’s our Human Resources Manager in New York, by title, but in practice, she is so much more.  As she describes it, her role in a nutshell entails helping make sure we find, hire, support, develop and care for an office of wonderfully talented people.  Emphasize that latter part about the wonderfully talented people, because that’s Marta. Born and raised a New Englander, Marta is a blueberry-pie-making-diva, artist and nature lover with a zest for life.   In her words, everyone should “Make time for what feeds your heart and awakens your sense of wonder.”  Words to live by for sure. Here’s more from her interview. 

Q: What made you …

Randy Deutsch AIA, LEED-AP, has posted a very positive review of our little BIM-IPD group here in Chicago, as well as our new office.  Randy is one of our members, and an influential writer and educator in the Chicagoland area.   A link to Randy’s blog is here, with the full article below.

David Ivey’s Chicago BIM-IPD Group meets every last Thursday of the month at HOK’s beautiful offices in Chicago’s Loop. Other cities have BIM-IPD groups: NYC, Seattle, San Francisco among a dozen others. But there’s something happening here on the 14th floor in the main conference room on these nights that can only be described as necessary and magical.

That’s not to say one …

About the same time the United Nations Climate Change Conference was taking place in Copenhagen in December, Stan Wrzeski, LEED AP, joined HOK’s Sustainability Consulting group as director of carbon and climate action. Intrigued by Stan’s title and equally unique resume, I gave him a call in HOK’s San Francisco office, where he’s based, to ask “Five Questions.”

1. You are the director of carbon and climate action at HOK, and your bio says you will be “identifying and pursuing carbon market opportunities.” What does this mean?

SW: I think it means HOK is drawing a much bigger circle around what we do. The word “carbon” …

I’ve been skimming along the blogs over the past couple of days and finally, after seeing 10 posts reference this blog, I had to read more. It’s called Unhappy Hipsters and its absolutely hilarious. This anonymous blogger essentially has taken snapshots from various Dwell magazine photos and added amazing captions. They are bleeding with satire and irony. For instance, to the photo above it reads

“In search of a less bleak playground, the toddler pedaled faster.” (Dwell, June 2004)

It’s a new blog it looks like with the number of posts, I would spend a few minutes and read them all!

via  Archinect, and SwissMiss

Take comfort, fellow bloggers. Life at HOK is hereby carbon neutral — and will be for the next 50 years.

The fine folks at the “Make it green” programme in Germany conceived of the “My blog is carbon neutral” concept, and they’ve promised to plant a tree to offset the emissions …

Tech Nerds Unite!

Apple has finally announced their next big thang – the iPad.  I would already be asking the people that love me to start saving up for my annual <looks at calendar> Valentine’s Day Gift, but let’s be honest here, I physically don’t have room in my purse for one.  It’s already crammed full with not one but TWO iPods, an iPhone and yes, a Kindle.  Let’s do the math here.

2(iPod) + iPhone + Kindle = iPad.

Therefore…

2(iPod) + iPhone + Kindle + iPad = Crazy As A Soup Sandwich

So, sorry Apple, but I think I have to pass on this one.

Unless of course Apple starts making extremely …

Some days, you get hit by a little poo water.  Usually “poo water” is figurative (such as Worst Week Ever).  Sometimes, not so much.

The HOK WDC office is located in a beautiful historic building (Canal House) in the Georgetown Section of Washington, DC.  Located right on the C&O canal, the building was originally industrial (see smokestack), and more recently was a Conrad’s store (now out of business).  Today, the lower two floors are occupied by HOK, while the upper levels are residential (pricey condos).

This week, one of our upstairs condo neighbors had a bit of a problem with their plumbing:

…

So I’m finally jumping on the bandwagon…

I saw Avatar.

It was awesome.  I’m not typically one for sci-fi-ish fantastical wonderful-ness, but this really rocked.  The 3d glasses and all.  Yes, we all know that it has grossed an absurd amount of money, that audiences have been deeply affected by it, that the plot has been disected from every angle, that the technology utilized was ground-breaking… but for me, it was interesting walking out afterwards to discuss with the architect/boyfriend about the differences between what he saw and what I saw. 

What did I see? An amazing reimagining of our environment.  The inspiration drawn from so many of …

Pecha Kucha!  Yes, Pecha Kucha Night has finally landed in the STL. Tomorrow night, St. Louis–along with Brussels, Belgium, Durban, South Africa, and a few other cities worldwide–will be celebrating design and creativity, PK-style.

For those of you not already familiar with Pecha Kucha, it’s a fast paced format for artists, entrepreneurs, designers and anyone with big ideas to show them off using 20 slides, 20 seconds each. This is our first shot at this and it promises to be a great night. As one in a team of organizers, I am both nervous and excited.  The worldwide popularity of PK has created some mighty tall shoes to …

Meet Teresa… aka Mother Earth. Well, maybe she isn’t technically Mother Earth, but she certainly channels her. (Just wait until you see here high school year book photo!) Teresa is a landscape architect with a focus and commitment to sustainable ecological urbanism. When she began at HOK three years ago, she sat in the Atlanta office before heading to Chicago and spear heading Land + Water.  
 Teresa is passionate about her profession and an example that it is never too late to follow your heart. When her daughters were both in elementary school, she decided to leave a 12-year career …

As most of you know, LA is usually sunny and hot.  But we have been hit hard this week by a few fast moving storms.  We had tons of rain – flooded most of Long Beach, thunder loud enough to set off car alarms, and even had a tornado… And today, we had 5 mins of hail.. (I know.. its crazy!)

I miss the warm weather…

I found this article/slide show very interesting and wanted to share.

I’m not saying I agree with the statement that a “passivhaus is the real standard for a real green house”, BUT there are some great solutions.

What do you think?

It is my complete pleasure and honor to bring you the next installment of Women Across HOK, Sherin Aminossehe.  This senior planner in our London office is a creative light shining bright all over the world.  In addition to being sharp as a tack and having an incredible ability to juggle complex projects, Sherin can chat it up on virtually any subject in her very personal and disarming way…making friends everywhere she goes.  She is an avid reader, artist and takes fabulous vacations as you can see in pics below.

I first met Sherin about four years ago.  Since then, she has been my go-to person for information on projects, people, you name it. She always delivers and despite time zones and …

So I was recently in Las Vegas which is filled with wonderfully horrible architecture. But the best thing I saw was the construction of a new bridge while I drove across the Hoover Dam to get to the Grand Canyon. Maybe I should have become an engineer, because this excited me more than any building in Vegas including the new City Center project.

Highlights from the trip? The Grand Canyon is pretty amazing as is the Liberace Museum.

…

So apparently we need to build a superscraper taller than the Burj Khalifa on a small island in Miami called Miapolis, a “city within a city.” It just doesn’t feel right to me. Thoughts?

Working at HOK, we’re routinely given the opportunity to get involved with charitable and community organizations. Here in the St. Louis office, we’ve been working pro bono with the City of St. Louis and the Animal House Fund to create a new city animal shelter, dubbed the Animal House. The hope is that a nicer facility, combined with a better location, will promote higher adoption rates. The new facility will offer increased capacity as well as a more modern, humane environment for the animals. The design documents are 95% complete and the only thing standing in the way of constructing this facility is funding.

To …

I found this website this morning about Sourcemap, a framework developed by the MIT Media Lab for individuals to share information about the locations of sourced product components and where their assemblies take place. I think this is a fantastic idea considering that individuals can start to take control of where their company’s source products. In 5-10 years, there will be no excuse for “not knowing” what went into that new bed, or that computer you just bought.

“Sourcemap is an opensource project that, like Wikipedia, relies on volunteers to grow and fine-tune the database. The hope is to develop a sourcemap for every product and service out there. It is supply chain …

One week ago today, on January 12, 2010, a 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti.  We’ve seen the news reports and heard about the devastation and aid headed to those in need.

So here we are, wondering what we can do and how this happened.

What Can We Do?  I’ve seen a lot of caring people lately.  HOK showed that we care by making a donation to the American Red Cross, friends I know have donated money to an array of organizations, and I have even made a small personal donation to Direct Relief International.  Here’s where you can go to donate: popular donation sites.  How about donating services or goods?  Perhaps …

To further our Women Across HOK series, we’ll next zoom over to St Louis to visit with Valerie Greer, a senior architect, who was one of the major forces behind the inimitable KAUST project.  She is a rising star in the St Louis office and, since her trip around the world for the office, has become a company-wide name.  A fellow-HOKLife-Blogger, Valerie always has a sensible world, a sharp design eye, and unending patience to lend to a project – and that makes her an inspiring woman at HOK.

Q: How did you decide to become an architect?

I graduated from college with an English major …