I have a confession…I moonlight…
Yes, it’s true, I have another passion outside architecture and design. I advise on urban policy to political parties in the UK. This is a rather un-architect thing to do, or so I’m reliably informed, but I’ve always fervently believed that if you want to improve things and have a say on issues that directly affect you, then the only way to make a difference is to be involved and make your voice heard. To steal a phrase from our current government, I call it “Professional Localism”.
About two months ago, whilst we were in the throes of poltical wrangling amidst post general election uncertainty, I was asked by the New London Architecture to write for their quarterly publication on my …
Last week Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino from Tinker London gave a lunch lecture at HOK London about digital data and the city.
I had met Alexandra at liftconference this spring, where she was giving a short talk on her firm’s work (here a link to her talk). And immediately I thought: that’s a great topic for a lunch talk at HOK.
We provided Alex with a good audience – in spite of the sunny weather outside the boardroom was packed with people.
Tinker London
Alex is the founder of Tinker London, a digital and interactive design firm. She specializes in an area called “the internet of things” – a way of linking objects to the internet and get usable data out of them. …
It is my complete pleasure and honor to bring you the next installment of Women Across HOK, Sherin Aminossehe. This senior planner in our London office is a creative light shining bright all over the world. In addition to being sharp as a tack and having an incredible ability to juggle complex projects, Sherin can chat it up on virtually any subject in her very personal and disarming way…making friends everywhere she goes. She is an avid reader, artist and takes fabulous vacations as you can see in pics below.
I first met Sherin about four years ago. Since then, she has been my go-to person for information on projects, people, you name it. She always delivers and despite time zones and …
This is an update of a post I did way back in April on a new diagonal Japanese style pedestrian crossing at Oxford Circus. This area is held close to the hearts of HOK Londoners as we were resident in the the floor above Topshop, just above Oxford Circus tube state, for a wonderful ten years (my bank balance is now thanking me that we have moved, as I did have a good daily routine of taking the ’short cut’ through Topshop to ‘browse’ on my way home…).
So back to the topic – the pedestrian crossing. This may seem a topic …
About a year ago, I gave you an update of what was going on in my work life. Looking back over the last year of Life@HOK, I thought it might be fun to revisit that post,and let you know what’s going on now! You’ll see from the list below that some things have stayed the same, but lots of cool new things have come up too!
Revisiting old news:
- GSA Unit Cost Study: just about wrapped up!
- U.S. Capitol Complex Master Plan (still going, and I still can’t tell you more or I’d have to shoot you)
- Blogging on The Green Workplace
- Blogging on Life@HOK
Sharing new news:
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Open House is a UK charily set up influence the future shape of London by “highlighting and promoting architectural excellence”, “enabling everyone to build their understanding of architecture and of the impact it has on broader social issues – and to challenge them to think differently”, “support people in articulating and expressing their needs and aspirations for the quality of the spaces and places they use every day” and “involve Londoners of all ages and abilities in the development of strategies for a better built environment”.
What an amazing charity you are probably thinking, and so am I! We need these not just for london but also for other, more regional cities and towns where perhaps planning considerations may be under less public scruitny. …
http://www.vimeo.com/992494
Two trains of thought. The city planned by the people, and the city planned for the people.
What do you think? Is one more democratic? Is one more successful and to whom? Is there a difference in the individual good and the collective good and do we view them differently? (think hard about that last one)
Maybe it’s both, I don’t know. But I have my assumptions. Maybe there’s just the ‘public’ and ‘planned’ framework that’s the most important part. Like New York City in the 1811?
One more thought. In the scheme of things, ‘What would nature do?’ Develop a framework or organize a system that builds its own framework? Instead of the ‘overlay’ for the greater good, it could …
Okay, I know this comes from a biased, but proud, uncle – but I tend to have to agree with him…
John Vogl, the sick and awesome mind behind The Bungaloo here in St Louis, is the nephew of Mark Vogl, Vice President of the Planning Group , and he, quite frankly, rocks.
John was recently highlighted in an interview at OMG Posters, and it’s hilarious. At my house, we own several of John’s posters which are ragingly displayed all over our house. Add one to your home and you’ll smile a little bit each time you see it. Enjoy!
Blog readers recently got to meet HOK Planning Group landscape architect and urban planner Mark Vogl. After that post, one in particular – you know who you are – came running over to tell me that instead of just a talking head she’d like to actually see some of Mark’s work. So here it is, an amazing St. Louis success story: The Great Rivers Greenway District project.
As bloggers and blog readers, I thought you all might be interested in the awesome list I found: Top 10 Free Web Resources for Planning.
The list was generated as part of a presentation for the APA National Conference, and includes some of our favorites such as blogs (!), social networking, and twitter. I love that other planners are catching on to some of the fantastic, sustainable resources out there. That said, here’s the list:
- Google Maps Mashups
- Video
- Twitter
- Virtual Meetings
- Wikis
- Social Networking
- Blogs
- RSS & Alerts
- Crowdsourcing
- Texting/SMS
In the spirit of true collaboration, and building on John’s post about Dhaval I thought I’d share what I saw when I looked across the office to tell Dhaval he’d been blogged…
That’s Dhaval, along with Han Hsi Ho, and Colin Greene from the DC office.
The whole crew’s here to work on a large-scale urban design and planning project that’s going on in India, and the worksession has been fast and feverish. Buro Happold and our old friends, the Biomimicry Guild, are here, and you can practically smell the brain juice flowing out of the conference room the team has taken over….
The other day Steve Ma posted about his team’s plan to help the Government of Maharashtra lead the redevelopment process of Dharavi — a vast “slum” in the heart of Mumbai – with a sustainable, respectful, planning-led approach.
Prasoon Kumar then sent us these images from his team’s site visit to Dharavi:
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That’s Prasoon with Steve Townsend in the last image.
There’s more on the Dharavi Evolution site.
I’m glad Slumdog Millionaire got the recognition it deserves. I hope Dharavi does also. The Dharavi community, a vast “slum” in the heart of Mumbai, played host to some of the shooting for the movie. For those of you who don’t know it, Dharavi is a squalid, dynamic place of more than 1 million people, a city unto itself, and by no means the only slum in Mumbai, but certainly one of the largest (in the world for that matter).
Consider that one out of every six people in the world lives in similarly impoverished conditions. Entree into the slums is very easy: fewer property problems, patterns of village life are replicated, and business is done with similar …
“The Creation of a Thousand Forests is in One Acorn”
What better phrase to encapsulate all that our leader, Chip Crawford, is to us here at the HOK Planning Group. Chip is, as some may know, the founder of the Planning Group. He is an inspiration every day to those of us lucky enough to sit with him in St Louis, and he has touched so many lives around the globe.
On January 30, we had a nice gathering in St. Louis to celebrate his 25 years and present him with generous gifts contributed by Planning team members from around the globe as well as the poster you see …
Colin Greene of the HOK Planning Group in Washington, DC, specializes in town planning and community design — and I’ve always thought he has a great voice for radio. Here Colin talks about choices, inspiration, sustainability and more.
Previous edition. (we’re on a Colin theme!)
Based in Atlanta, Monte Wilson is a senior vice president in the HOK Planning Group.
“It’s a good time to do what we do. The services that we provide as planners, urban designers and landscape architects are, on a certain level, perhaps recession-proof. Folks are always needing to evaluate what to do next in our cities and communities. … The project work that we have going on right now on the boards just in the Planning Group amounts to a land area the size of Connecticut. When you think about that impact we have through our planning decisions on the built form – the transportation networks, the environment, the water, et cetera – there is a huge responsibility.”
Previous edition.
What makes metropolitan and regional economies thrive? The keys are talent, innovation, connections and distinctiveness, says Joe Cortright, an economist in Portland, Oregon. Joe’s firm, Impresa, specializes in regional economic analysis, innovation and industry clusters. He is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and a Senior Policy Advisor for CEOs for Cities, a national network of urban leaders dedicated to creating cities for the future.
I talked to Joe as part of the HOK Planning Group’s exploration of the city of the future. I found his theory on the Green Dividend – a computation of the actual economic benefits that people and places (like Portland)
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HOK began its seven-year relationship with Lavasa as part of an international competition to plan the first new hill station in India since the country was freed from British rule. The winning concept was just the beginning of HOK’s involvement in this series of compact villages dappled along the water’s edge of 9000+ acres in the mountainous Western Ghats region between Mumbai and Pune.
St. Louis-based urban designer Dhaval Barbhaya has been one of the project leaders for HOK since the beginning. Over the past seven years, he has traveled to India more than 50 times. Click the play button to hear Dhaval describe how water has inspired the design of this incredible place.
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Petra Todorovich is Director of America 2050 for the Regional Plan Association (RPA), an independent planning organization for the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut region. She’s also fun to talk to, very cool and off-the-charts intelligent. America 2050’s goals include nothing less than developing a national infrastructure investment plan. Petra says that “making the connections between transportation, land use and climate change is going to be the key responsibility of urban planners in this century.”
I talked to her recently to help the HOK Planning Group with its ongoing exploration of the city of the future.
JG: What exactly is the RPA?
PT: RPA has been around since the 1920s, …
