Mark Cannata, MA RIBA, AABC, joined HOK’s London office in December 2008 as Head of Culture + Heritage.
Mark grew up in Italy, where he studied Architectural Engineering at the University of Catania before returning to the UK to study Architecture at Leeds Metropolitan University and the Architectural Association. Prior to joining HOK, he worked in the UK and Italy, spending five years as head of the Historic Buildings Unit at John McAsian + Partners in London. Here he worked on transformation projects for some of the most important 20th century buildings, including Erich Mendelsohn’s De La Warr Pavilion and James Stirling’s History Faculty Library.
One of HOK’s fastest-growing markets …
So this is my first blog post to Life at HOK. Here we go!
I read about a dozen blogs or so regularly (design blogs, political blogs, neighborhood blogs, and yes…a celebrity gossip blog) and sometimes I run across something that needs to be shared. It usually comes in the form of a remarkable design that completely stops my train of thought and breaks into my creative mind. A part, which I must admit, is not used as much as when I was in school. For some reason my projects become focused around loading docks.
So I ran across this a couple weeks ago and thought it was one of the best adaptive reuse projects …
A couple of weeks back, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the lone newspaper in town, came calling to us wanting to know if and when we’ve ever worked on a project converting an empty big box shell (think Wal-Mart, Target, Sam’s Club, etc.) into usable, possibly even livable space.
We provided them with some snippets, that unfortunately were never used, but in return I found this interesting article in the Washington Post that served as research for the more St. Louis-focused Post-Dispatch article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/13/AR2008111303039.html
So how would you reuse an empty big box? What would you make of it?
These adaptive reuse ideas are becoming more and more prevalent as the economy continues to struggle for life and retailers have to start closing their doors …
