I just met a new awesome woman of HOK: the Planning Group’s fabulous Amy Roots, from HOK’s Toronto office.  No, I didn’t meet her because of a project or any official reason.  I met her because another awesome woman of HOK (Jeannette Thompson) decided that we should connect.  And we did! 

Amy’s about the same age that I am (we refer to ourselves as “tweeners” – not quite at the senior executive level, but well into our careers), and has been at HOK for about the same amount of time.  We giggled about how being in your early 30s is fantastic because it’s the “whatever” years.  Whatever you do …

In her role as HOK recruiter, Nikki Duffner is always on the lookout for new design talent. She’s also attuned to noticing how design can improve people’s lives – sometimes in fresh and unexpected ways.

I think it’s safe to assume that design probably wasn’t top-of-mind when Nikki had to accompany her young son Max for a seven-day stay at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.

Yet that’s where they came face-to-face with a bright green alligator wagon. It wheeled past them and helped turn what could’ve been a stressful hospital experience into a playful one.  

She later discovered the wagon was the creation of a good friend of hers, Jack Heller. …

The bobblehead created for Bill Valentine is an award that will travel worldwide to recognize offices and teams for advancing the HOK Sustainable Roadmap.

The Roadmap is taking sustainability to the next level at HOK globally. It was launched with a series of workshops at offices worldwide that generated ideas to reach the goals of the Roadmap. I previously blogged about the goals in an earlier post “On the (Sustainable) Road | Some Ideas from Tampa” (http://hoklife.com/2010/07/07/on-the-sustainable-road-some-ideas-from-tampa/), which briefly described some ways HOK is measuring and recording our progress. 

“Bill” has visited a few locations to award ideas that included incentives for becoming a new LEED® AP and creating a green scorecard for catering office luncheons and L-n-L presentations. …

The St. Louis Office has begun participating in a new service called Fruit My Cube.  The Farmer’s Market in Belleville, IL has come up with a new business idea that connects hungry office-bound folks with healthy snacks.   Our employees can sign-up to have their cubes (or in our case workstations) “fruited.”    For $9.99/week we receive a box filled with 16 pieces of fruit and vegetables delivered to our office.  The fruit & veggie types change weekly and selections are seasonal.

This week our box contained apples, oranges, peaches, grapes, plums, pluots, baby carrots, a tomato, and an avocado. That’s a ton of fruit, so the STL …

If you think that architects have the power to make a difference in the world, you should read this book. If you don’t think so, you absolutely have to read this book.

The Power of Pro Bono

We don’t have to wear uniforms here at HOK (thank goodness!) but some days getting ready for work I feel I’m wearing one anyway - 

The Typical Michelle Uniform:
Funky Skirt + Cardigan + Sensible Low Heel 

For the guys I work with there also appears to be a bit of a uniform:

Some form of Khaki Pants + Any Variation on a Plaid Shirt + A Brown or Black Moccasin 

Growing up, I never had to wear a uniform to school, and I …

The HOK Sustainable Roadmap contains a couple of key components that direct us to achieve its goals: Design, Services, People, and Practices. Within the Practices, there is a main goal to “embody exemplary green operations” and it includes a checklist that can consistently measure each office’s performance towards a sustainable workplace.

This checklist known as the “HOK Sustainable Operations Plan” is organized much like the US Green Building Council’s LEED™ Rating System. Credits are divided into categories and each category includes Prerequisites (required items) and recommended Credits. Offices were given the opportunity to be rewarded for innovative ideas not already included in this Plan and earn up to 2 additional credits

I asked the …

You are looking at Dallas’s newest challenge. Well, half of it at least. The 7’x7’              “World’s Largest Crossword Puzzle” was a little too big for our break room, so here’s part of it.

A few members of our in-house ACT Committee noticed the newspaper’s crossword puzzle getting completed a little too often.

This should hold’em.

And now you know someone that has actually purchased something from skymall.  I know, I know… I thought it was just a magazine museum for extremely useful products too.

What do you think, can you give

…

It’s one thing to bet the shirt off your back. It’s another thing to bet a shirt onto your back. 

The Lakers, a quality basketball team and winners of this year’s championship, have a very nice shirt. The Celtics, a “quality” basketball team and, well, not the winners of the year’s championship have a shirt as well. But you won’t see a Celtics shirt on Mr. Mark Fernandes, despite the fact that a Celtics shirt would be his preference.

Mark, a Boston native and fan, but a Los Angeles resident, made a bet with co-worker Kyle Wang. Lake-show wins, Mark wears their jersey. Celts win, Kyle wears their jersey. Kyle did not wear a jersey …

HOK Florida has been in the spotlight lately and earning free publicity for some notable projects.  
American Style magazine – billed as the “nation’s premier magazine for art, collectors, and cultural travelers” - named St. Petersburg as the top arts destination in the country, out of all mid-sized cities. The magazine cited the new wing at the Museum of Fine Arts and the under-construction Dali Museum.

In addition, AIA Florida has announced the 2010 Florida/Caribbean Honor & Design Award Winners. In the Design Awards category HOK received the Award of Excellence for the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum. The firm will formally receive the award at the Honor & Design Awards Presentation and …

The St. Louis Diversity Task Force concocted an exciting office-wide event blending elements from four popular games: The Amazing Race, Survivor, Lego and The Game of Life.

Designed to lower the barriers that separate practice neighborhoods, The Amazing HOKLife encouraged people to collaborate with members of other groups while promoting a deeper cohesiveness among the people and teams that form the HOK St. Louis community.

Armed with maps and instructions, 20 teams visited “neighborhoods” and gathered as many Lego pieces as possible to build the most creative structure to enter in a prestigious design competition (juried by HOK practice leaders, who are still deliberating…)

Congrats to our …

I’m always interested to find out what HOKers do in their spare time when they’re not in the office. There’s always a great travel story or a profile of an individual and their volunteer work, and it’s great to find out what makes everyone tick in the HOK community. As I’ve been quite busy in my time away from the office lately, I wanted to share a little of what I’ve been up to when I’m not helping out our sustainable design practice in San Francisco.

Always been fascinated with images that capture a moment. When you see something that catches your eye, you may not even understand why, …

I’ve just finished a charrette for a master plan project in Southern California in which our LA office is collaborating with Chris Fannin, Director of Planning from our St. Louis office. One of the great intro that Chris brought up that I thought worth sharing here was raising the question ‘What is the google image of our project?’

This has not been an option to look at architecture until few years ago when google maps go mobile, which was planned to run on any Java-based phone or mobile device with free navigation that will definitely have a major impact on the navigation industry. And this is even a bigger question for …

Hey there folks - excited newbie here!

Having been with HOK San Francisco for almost 2 1/2 years now, I have been reading and enjoying Life at HOK for some time. I decided to make the switch from ’lurker’ to ’blogger’, seeing that we have just Niall blogging from SF. I hope to offer my take on SF, life, work and everything else!

For my first post (whee!), here’s something I have immensely enjoyed reading: The best ideas of 2009, culled by NYT. There’s more than a few that relate to architecture or design in some way:

http://www.nytimes.com/projects/magazine/ideas/2009/

My next few posts (if all goes per plan) should be from China and India, where I will …

The HOK Miami office is making a difference in response to the Haiti earthquake that will reach thousands in the disaster stricken communities.

Last month while listening to NPR on the way home, Sam Ward realized that Haiti was becoming a forgotten tragedy and started looking for a new angle to help and decided to approach his collogues for ideas. In order to make this more than a design exercise they needed to work with an entity that already had the infrastructure in place to institute their design, whatever that may be.  They started emailing governmental agencies, US and Haitian, about how they could get involved.

They came across an article about …

Here’s the thing about the Sustainable Roadmap - it’s really not that complicated. Being sustainable, after all, is partially about doing less for a greater good. Doing less.

So it’s no revelation that when the Los Angeles “Sustainable Ops” group got together to discuss ways to be more sustainable in our day-to-day operations, many of the action items on our list were … simple. Now, an office can be a complicated and hungry beast. It’s hard to see quite how hungry it is as you go about your day. You walk in, you get a coffee. You turn on a light, you turn on your computer. There’s the emails to read, the instructions to remember. You print out a …

One of the blessings/curses of being a registered member of any profession is continuing education.  Here at HOK, we have many different registered professionals: AIA, ASLA, LEED, AICP, etc. I am a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP). While our certification maintenance requirements are not terribly onerous, they can be difficult to achieve – there just aren’t as many AICP CM providers as there are AIA, for example!  This week I found an event that met the CM trifecta: interesting, local, and free! 

Held at the National Building Museum and co-presented by the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), this was a fantastic symposium: Power, Architecutre …

Last week I had the unique opportunity to attend the annual GSA Project Knowledge and Technology Showcase in New Orleans – as an exhibitor. Now, I have attended many industry events as the attendee, but never on the other side of the booth. It was certainly an eye-opening experience to deliver a concise message about HOK’s phenomenal abilities and technology. I was joined by Robin Ellerthorpe and Tim Barry from our Advance Strategies group and we evolved our combined message about BIM in design and construction flowing into integrated workplace management systems.

A really important result of our collaboration and preparation for this event was the creation of the HOK buildingSMART web page. …

As Blake reminded us, May is bike to work month.  Hopefully you’ve all pulled out your cycles and gotten moving – HOK certainly has!  Based on our success last year, we’ve again joined the Cascade Bicycle Club Community Health Challenge.

With 10 teams and 78 riders at the time of this post, we’ve logged over 2,800 miles, putting us in the top 20 companies participating (again)….and if some of our regular riders remember to log their miles, we’ll be even higher!

Anyway, the point of this post is not to brag about how awesome HOK is (or specifically about the WDC teams) – it’s to reach out to you to see …

You think I have flipped with my new addiction to the ‘open space’ of biomimicry. But below, a FastCompany article/series called ”Case Studies in Sustainability: The Designer’s Accord“ is yet another cool dose, this time with IDEO, an incredible thinking-powerhouse in their effort to redesign the internal structure of the USGBC. My dream is that HOK can muster the courage to look at how we are organized…and how we might become more resilient and organic…more nimble…inclusive…able to adapt and evolve with the speed of this new world economy.

A regenerative HOK would be our greatest contribution to sustainability.
 

Our clients clearly need this and I know if we listen carefully …

So one of the perks of working at HOK is that we get to see all kinds of cool spaces. Frequently we’re touring for the purposes of our own project (for example, when we went on a tour of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing as part of a pre-bid meeting); sometimes we get to tour completed HOK facilities.

This week, Walter Urbanek and Frank Etro of the DC office organized a fantastic field trip to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum (NASM) – Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington Dulles International Airport.  HOK is currently doing construction administration on the second …

Sent to me by our BIM manager, technology guru, sustainable enthusiast, former industrial designer, enlightened thinker and jack of all trades… Dave Ivey. Thanks for a funny start to Monday Dave.

For those of you urban planners out there, I simply had to share this awesome periodic table of planning elements that I found via our friends at Planetizen.  Create your own structural formula of “planning compounds!”

I think this is hilarious – and definitely wonder why “Bs – Broadcast Studio” made it into the column reserved for noble gasses…maybe because lots of hot air is generated there?

Image by Ric Stephens of  Stephens Planning & Design.

Typically, I have to admit that I’m not that into watching buildings come down.  But, sometimes, a good demo comes along that just needs to be passed around.  With many thanks to Charlie Lutz, I present…

Good Bye To A Texas Stadium!

Click here for the amazing interactive video…

We’ve talked before about my job as a member of HOK’s Advance Strategies team.  As you may remember, one of the things that is a big focus for Advance Strategies, as well as HOK’s Interiors group, is workplace strategy.  We’re passionate about developing, designing, and implementing workplaces that work (and are beautifully designed, too)! 

We thought it might be cool to share our knowledge about the workplace online: voila,  Work+Place was born!  This site is a blog authored by a global team of HOK people who are out doing this work in every corner of the world, and who are dedicated to exploring all things “workplace” – you …

An entire miniature city built from paper clips! Check it out; Ephemicropolis by Peter Root.

The 2010 FITC award winners have been announced and one of the most unique online sketching programs, that I’ve come across, was a finalist! When you have a spare moment, take some time to express yourself with Odosketch!

FITC (Flash In The Can) is an organization that recognizes excellence in the design + technology world, bringing like-minded people together. In the last 8 years, FITC has produced events ranging from Flash to Motion Design, FLEX to AIR, Mobile and more. Check out the full list of 2010 finalists and winners.

Rain’s in the forecast and so what better excuse do I have to post-pone that massive amount of yardwork I would love to be doing to bring you a bit more….Freno!  Matt showed me the video he and Javier, another co-hort from Planning who also sits next to Matt, created showing the features of this product. I’ve embedded the video below, but for those of you more literary types, here’s the deal in print.

To touch on what we covered in the last post, Freno is what we call a segmental wall system, it’s basically a kit of 3 concrete parts that are precast just like building blocks in a variety of arrangements to accommodate any site’s installation …

Earth Day also happened to be Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work day for many schools throughout the country. I have 10 year old twins who really enjoy spending the day at my office…who am I kidding? They get out of school for the day! This year was the first year I had them both join me on my daily journey. It was also a unique opportunity to teach them about the ‘green’ aspects of my workday.

First, was the low-carbon commute. We walk to the train station, take the commuter line into New York City, then a short ride on the subway and a one block walk on a beautiful morning to the office. No cars, no traffic involved. …

As many of you know, our own Leigh Stringer has been hitting the talk circuit pretty hard to promote sustainability in the office (and her book, The Green Workplace).  Last Wednesday, Leigh had the opportunity to speak to the U.S. Green Building Council’s National Capital Region chapter.

Following an introduction and update on the chapter’s activities by Executive Director Tom Mawson, and a thoughtful introduction by Laura Schonfeld (Secretary of the Board of Directors), Leigh took to the stage. 

Her presentation discussed the context for the book, AHA! moments she had while writing it, and an analysis of what is coming down the pipeline …