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 …

The world needed another blog like it needed another hole in the ozone layer. But, a year ago today, we went ahead and did it.

Here are some of the most popular posts from Life at HOK’s first 365 days, as selected by a top-secret panel of judges sequestered for weeks in a beachside bamboo cottage in Tahiti, with a little help from Google Analytics.

On This Episode of MTV Cribs Toronto
By Justin Zawyrucha
MTV@HOK

The Size of the Stimulus
By Jodi Williams
Viral

The Oscars, Slumdog Millionaire, Dharavi and HOK
By Steve Ma
Thought-provoking

Lighting Up Your Business Cards
By Jeremy Smith
Cool

From Architect to Artist: Andrew Reach Comes ‘Full Circle’ at Frost Museum
By Mike Plotnick
Inspiring

…

Not too long ago, fellow HOK blogger Justin wrote about the perception of architects.  I rather enjoyed that blog and wanted to do a sort of counter/comparison with the perception of engineers.

For starters, I went to a search engine and typed in “structural engineer” images.  I was not surprised to see some rather silly images…but also a lot of construction site images…

The next thing I did was to ask around to see what the perception was of an engineer, or …

So this is my 100th blog post on HOKLife. I really don’t know what to make of that number. The average number of posts is around 20 for this site, so does that make me active on here, or just desperate for attention? I’m not really sure. But if it wasn’t for the people reading south of the border (I’m pretty sure no one from the Toronto office reads the blog anymore), I’m not sure if I would have made it to 100.  So I say thank you to the dozen or so people who read my nonsense. I’m not sure if there is any merit to my ramblings, but somebody seems to like it, or they would have told …

We were enjoying our Friday afternoon snacks and counting down the minutes until we could fly the coop, when all of a sudden, the Corporate Communications team was paged to the front desk. Hmmm, who could it be?

To our surprise, it was the crew from St. Louis Magazine! They were armed with a very glossy framed magazine cover of their newest issue  featuring the St. Louis A-List 2009. As our eyes scanned to the bottom of the cover, we saw in big, bold print….”Company Blog: HOK“!!! We were handpicked as the best blog!! Hooray!!

We really ARE the A-team! Thanks to all the awesome bloggers …

A continuation of   ‘So what I hear you saying.’
.
It was like a chess match, and he was waiting to call checkmate. At first we just sat in silence, staring at each other. Flexing our eyebrows in different, unique shapes. He was actually looking at a piece of paper, but I knew something was about to happen.
“Hello” was his first word, making each word thereafter even more important then the first.
“I looked at your performance review, and … umm Justin?” I couldn’t concentrate.
“Oh, sorry. I was thinking about what I had for lunch.”
I had been going to Quiznos almost everyday for the better of three years. I would enter and without even a single word spoken, have my meal prepared …

Every six months we like to get our global team of HOK Life bloggers together to exchange helpful blogging tips and banana muffin recipes and and to continue charting our plot for global domination. Last week about 30 of us assembled around a virtual table, connected via WebEx. This included a group of 10 who gathered in our underground blogging bunker in an undisclosed St. Louis-area location. 

Rachel and Jaki ran the show. They take punctuality very seriously, and actually locked and barred the door of the secret lair, aka “The Thunder Room,” at exactly 10:00 A.M. CST. Sorry, Mike, a meeting with Gyo is no excuse. We’ll fill you in later on what you missed….

It is no secret that times are tough. People in every industry are facing slowing business and job cuts. Everyone is thinking about innovative ways to keep costs down while improving business. For a number of people who have been laid off, there aren’t many jobs out there to compete for.

In times like these it becomes increasingly important to manage one’s finances effectively. I’ve been a fan of personal finance websites and honestly cant get enough. They come in all shapes and sizes, from people that post their individual experiences to those that aggregate popular posts from other blogs. One of the biggest is PFblogs which aggregates more than 1000 blogs .

One blog I visit frequently is Get Rich Slowly. …

I have to be honest about something. My head has grown from this whole Blog thing. Well not really grown in size, but you get the idea. I was so pumped to be a part of HOKLife that I’ve made quite a few changes to go along with my newfound ‘popularity.’

Now I’m not going to lie to you. I’ve had a fair share read my content, just like everyone else on this Blog. But I’ve even obtained a bit of attention on this whole Internet thing. It’s almost as if I’m starting a new trend of everyone wanting to Blog. It’s kind of scary being an innovator. (Did you know that …

The rich, distinctive voices that are emerging through Life at HOK are generating some industry buzz. AIA Archiblog, the blog of the American Institute of Architects, features a great piece on our happy selves.  Penned by AIArchitect Associate Editor Zach Mortice, the post explores our purpose, links to sample posts, and includes the perspectives of Barry, Yiselle, John and Justin.

Here’s to our “vibrant design culture that reaches around the globe…”

HOK’s “Corporate Bloggers” (AIArchitect)

No, this is not a class at your local community college. And it’s not a spell from conceived from the Harry Potter line. The Lifehacker blog just posted about a free application called Tarpipe that will make your social media interactions much smoother and quicker. So where now if you take a picture that you want to post to Flickr, Facebook and your blog you have to do each as a separate action, Tarpipe helps streamline the process through managed workflows and activities that requires you to send one email.

I haven’t tested the functionality of the application, yet, but if it works as planned it could save a monumental …

If you didn’t get a chance to go to Greenbuild in Boston this year, plan to go next year. It was an event full of energy and passion as well as brilliant people, all with a laser-like focus on saving the planet. Really, not a bad way to spend a few days.
I had the great pleasure of moderating a panel there called “Green Blogs and the Built Environment” with four green bloggers, all who spend their days writing about the latest trends in architecture, product design, technology, urban planning and all things green. The panelists, Preston Kroner from Jetson Green, Lloyd Alter from Treehugger, Stephen Del Percio from Green Buildings NYC and Willem Mass from Green Home Guide (recently purchased …

Sitting in Boston for Greenbuild, I can’t help but think about all things sustainability-related.

This whole week, as I take in my first Greenbuild experience working the HOK booth, I’m going to try and blog, facebook, twitter, etc. from here. There’ll be pictures, videos, and my thoughts. Hopefully it will give you an inside look at Greenbuild.

This afternoon, more than 30 HOKers from numerous locations will meet to discuss sustainability issues on a firmwide basis and how to plan for the future at HOK Day. We’ll talk about sustainability in terms of design, people and our practices.

We will also be discussing the 2009 …

Say hey to the Life at HOK bloggers:

Among the things I do best, one of them is thinking (really..!! i mean as compared to doing..!!). So, I was thinking about the content for my first blog post. And as usual I turned to my usual help – Google: “architecture”, “comics”. Some very interesting links came up. One that caught my attention was this one.

I repeat “this one“.

I was amazed with the blog this architecture master’s student has put together. Not only does it have some really cool post about renderings with 3d max and photoshop, it also has great examples of serious fun some architecture students are having.

Here are some of the post’s I really liked.

This one about a tower building competition. What was …

This is the Houston representative for the HOK Blogger phenomenon. We are a new group of superstars who are going to show the world what this HOK show stopper is really all about. We deliver the “whoa”.

My life in a nut shell at HOK is architecture production with lessons on design through the grape vine. I’m a design pathed career kid looking for all the influence I can get in these early stages of my professional career just out of school. I work with a lot of very talented people who are absolutely a delight.

So here we are, roughly 21 hours since this crazy, firm-changing endeavor began, and there has already been so much covered. I’m on social media overload, which is just how I like it. That being said, I think there is only one image that can sum up our experience thus far (shared by jonasholmstrom on Flickr – trying to stay legal here).

And who said we couldn’t find Smurf photography?

I’m looking forward to the blogging world that awaits us…