The HOK St Louis office has been quite busy lately. So busy, some may say, we’ve been just a Chuggin-Along.  Asked by one of our clients, Peabody Energy, to design a tree for inclusion in the Children’s Holiday Festival, we happily hopped on board (man, the puns just keep coming!)

The Children’s Holiday Festival is an annual event to benefit St Louis Children’s Hospital, one of the premier children’s hospitals in the United States.  Trees are elaborately decorated and then auctioned off to the highest bidder.  The winner gets to take home the tree and the hospital gets a bump in funding. 

The theme for the tree this year …

For the second consecutive year, the Toronto studio participated in Habitat for Humanity’s Gingerbread Build. The design inspiration for this years house was the 2010 winter Olympics with a sprinkle of Dr. Seuss’ Who-ville.

The base is a sugar covered “Whistler” mountain with a competative skier making her way down the slalom course. At the finish line the Olympic mascots, including Quatchi the Sasquatch, Sumi the Thunderbird and Miga the Sea Bear, cheer her on! The house mimics a home from Who-ville painted in all 5 official Olympic colours and they’ve even included an Inukshuk marker at the top of the mountain to represent a guiding light for all our Canadian athletes!

GO CANADA GO!

All gingerbread houses will be auctioned …

HOK’s dragon boat team, Hell on Keels, recently clocked their best time of 2:21.59 during the Annual Great White North Dragon Boat Challenge, placing fifth overall in their division.

The race was in support of the YMCA of Greater Toronto, which serves 150,000 people of all ages in the Greater Toronto area alone. This year the race brought together 5,000 participants who helped the foundation achieve their goal of raising $150,000!

Congratulations to the following HOKers who participated in the event:
Catlin Turner
Deborah Sperry
Gordon Stratford
Heather Spithoff
James Janzer
Jozef Pilasanovic
Mounia Matta
Shahrazad Davoudi
Sharon Turner

AND a special thanks to HOK’s team Captain, Laura Fyles, for her dedication!

HOK’s future generation of architects, engineers and designers jumped in hands-first to help a worthy cause. The HOK St. Louis Diversity Task Force is sponsoring a back-to-school supply drive (August 17-21), collecting school supplies for two St. Louis community schools: Lyon-Blow Middle School and Wilkinson @ Roe Early Childhood Education Center.

To kick-off the event, the team hosted a special “KIDZ” art event where employees’ children helped decorate the supply drive boxes with some good old-fashioned hand painting.

“Thank you so much for making this a super fun event,” said Laura Zimmerman, of the HOK St. Louis accounting group. ”My son Robert had a great time, and I think my mom (Robert’s grandma) had just …

Remember back in elementary school when you had field day?  For me, that was always one of the best days of the year (I was a 3-legged race champ)!  This year, HOK participated in field day for grown ups, the JDRF Real Estate Games.

This event is an annual fundraiser for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.  This year’s event raised over $400K for the cause…and had over 2,000 participants.

The 2009 games were HOK’s first, and we had 10 participants in three events.

• Tennis singles (women’s) – Jelena Lustica
• Tennis doubles (men’s) – Todd Pedersen and Edmund Velasco
• 5K – Vincent Ng, Jennifer King, Claire Whitehill, Colleen Knapp, Daphne Kiplinger, Amy Fabry, and

…

Today a bunch of people at the HOK WDC office are switching desks, which has inspired me to straighten up mine a bit.  I found a bunch of old holiday cards (fewer than years past, as many companies are switching to e-cards!).  I was going to throw them in the recycling pile, but I remembered a website passed on by a friend: St. Jude’s Ranch for Children Card Recycling Program. 

This program takes the front piece of used greeting cards to create a new card.  The program is not only environmentally friendly, and a good fundraiser for the charity, but also helps the children express themselves creatively and learn the …