Is it possible to design a market-rate, zero carbon emissions office building in St. Louis? A dedicated team led by HOK and our friends at The Weidt Group decided to find out. The exciting news is that though a variety of conditions — from the climate to the cheap electricity — made St. Louis a challenging location, the answer is YES! And the design process will transfer to most North American cities. 

We’ll share details about the design and process …

It turns out the 40th anniversary of the original Earth Day intersects with the 30th service anniversary of our very own Earth Mother: Mary Ann Lazarus.

We celebrated this sweet synergy with some delicious green and white cupcakes. Sharing guest-of-honor duties was the incomparable Joyce Saunders (MAL’s right-hand gal), who recently marked her own milestone (25-year) HOK anniversary.

This greened-at-the-hip duo has worked together to advance sustainability within HOK – guiding it from an intriguing idea, to a fringe movement, to a specialty group, to an integral part of our entire practice.

During a brief tribute, Vice …

This is a report on the zero emissions building design charrette that took place on September 17. HOK and The Weidt Group participants in San Francisco, Toronto, St. Louis, Berkeley, Calif., and Minneapolis saved carbon emissions from air travel by using Cisco Telepresence Technology, Polyvision THUNDER Express, WebEx and HOK’s Advanced Collaboration Rooms to meet virtually.

The team designing the a zero carbon emissions office building has made lots of progress since my last ZEB post. With the final meeting fast-approaching and an affordable carbon-free solution on the horizon, it’s time to crank out some posts to catch you up on what they’ve been up to.

Finally, a Focus on the Building …

“Mary Ann and the Green Aha! Moments”

Armed with a low-carbon camcorder, two director’s chairs and a boatload of salsa mix, this quirky band of environmentalists is heading to the Great Southwest.

Our plans include rubbing elbows with Al Gore, Sheryl Crow, Anica Landreneau and dozens of other celebrity performers/speakers at the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo in Phoenix. We’re also on a mission to gather Green Aha! moments on video (not since An Inconvenient Truth has there been such raw anticipation for an environmental production).

Here’s a short video preview of our approach:

If you’re planning to be …

HOK has come a long way since making sustainability a core value in 1993. As Chairman Bill Valentine says in this new video (see if you can spot the Life at HOK bloggers): “We are not there but we are making giant strides.”

This is a report on the zero emissions building virtual design charrette that took place on August 26, 2009. HOK and The Weidt Group participants in San Francisco, Toronto, St. Louis and Minneapolis used Cisco Telepresence Technology, Polyvision THUNDER Express, WebEx and HOK’s Advanced Collaboration Rooms to communicate.

In this meeting The Weidt Group’s Chris Baker and Vinay Ghatti pushed the team closer to a zero emissions office building design by talking the group through a whopping 89-page Strategy Report describing the potential energy use, carbon emissions and cost implications of hundreds of specific energy conservation strategies.

The report documented the results of DOE-2 building simulations for each …

This is a report on the zero emissions building virtual design charrette that took place in HOK’s Advanced Collaboration Rooms in San Francisco, Toronto and St. Louis on 31 July 2009. Lots of video clips at the end!

This meeting began with a restating of the goal of designing a zero emissions building design that will reduce the energy requirements for a traditional St. Louis office building of 150,000-200,000 square feet by 70-80 percent. They will use on-site renewable energy sources to get the rest of the way to zero emissions.

Because energy conservation typically costs less than energy generation, the team is using off-the-shelf technologies to design a building that consumes 17-18 KTBUs …

Before there were audiobooks or books on tape — before there was even a printing press — there were storytellers who helped us understand the world.

Our friends at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts (hi Rachel Craft!) want to make sure that Life at HOK’s St. Louis readers know about their “Marathon Metamorphoses,” a two-day reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses sponsored by Pulitzer along with the St. Louis Poetry Center and River Styx. Seventy people, including HOK Sustainable Design Director Mary Ann Lazarus, will read passages of this epic narrative poem in 15-minute time slots. The readings will take place in the Pulitzer’s Main Gallery on August 29-30, from 10:00 a.m. to (roughly) 7:00 p.m….

The second zero emissions building design charrette took place July 23 in The Weidt Group’s naturally daylit offices in a Minneapolis suburb. The brainstorm team included five designers from each firm, with combined expertise in energy and daylighting modeling, architecture, engineering and integrated design. Click here to see the agenda.

The team began by restating its goal: To design a 150,000-200,000-square-foot, high-end speculative office building in St. Louis that is a zero emissions building (ZEB). The group also wants to document a process that could potentially change the way they design buildings.

HOK Sustainable Design Director Mary Ann Lazarus clarified the team’s definition of a zero emissions building: …

What does it take to design a net zero emissions office building? Because few of our clients are currently considering carbon neutrality in their projects, an HOK team — with help from some wonderful friends — is designing one through a series of virtual charrettes.

In response to Architecture 2030’s challenge to the global architecture and building community, HOK has committed to designing all buildings to be 100 percent carbon neutral by 2030.

The idea for the charrette is the brainchild of HOK Chairman Bill Valentine, who wants the firm’s people to gain the knowledge and experience required to design zero emissions buildings. This vision is being turned into reality …

“Right now is a great time to be entering the design profession because we are going through another revolution,” says HOK Sustainable Design Director Mary Ann Lazarus, AIA. ”We need to include young voices in the mix…we need to have our assumptions challenged.”

Greening a building is hard. Greening an entire organization is even harder. At last count, HOK had more than 900 LEED accredited professionals and 39 LEED certified projects (with 150+ pending). Those results don’t come from spreading magical green pixie dust across the firm. They come from blood, sweat, tears and an unwavering commitment to sustainable design. One of HOK’s earliest and hardest-working green pioneers has been Mary Ann Lazarus, who literally, along with Bill Odell and Sandra Mendler, wrote the book …

I know. I promised to try and frequently blog and post pictures from Greenbuild. I failed. Not for lack of effort. More like lack of time. Maybe next year.

As I look back on this trip, the most amazing thing about this event is the people – a people inspired by change. Everyone is cordial, welcoming and friendly. Everyone’s looking for answers to the growing questions surrounding sustainable design. Many answers are provided.

With my first trip to Greenbuild in the books, I’d like to walk you through it from my perspective as an exhibitor and not an attendee.

Monday, November 17, 2008
6:20 am – Flight leaves for Boston via DC. Much coffee needed.
11:15 am – Flight lands in Boston. Tim Gaidis and …

If you’ve worked at HOK for awhile or for a little, you are probably aware of our focus on sustainability in both our projects and practices. On Thursday, October 23, the outside world recognized our achievements as a firm once again. Several HOKers were present at the St. Louis Business Journal’s Heroes of the Planet Awards ceremony, where we were declared the winner in the Sustainable Employee Programs category. Here’s a link to a brief snippet about it (sorry, have to be a subsciber for the whole thing). Mary Ann Lazarus, firmwide Sustainable Design Director, and Tim Gaidis, Sustainable Champion in St. Louis, were on hand to receive the award. …