There is so much that can be said about the Idiotarod that it just won’t fit in this space.  So, I’ve decided to give you the condensed version.  Here, you’ll have, the who, what, when, where, and why of the St. Louis Idiotarod! [--Video (my team 27 secs in) --]

IDIOTAROD: Idiotarod pays homage to the Alaskan tradition of the Iditarod (going on right now) in which dogs pull a sled and musher across the Iditarod Trail. Idiotarod is similar, except replace the dogs with people and the sled with a shopping cart, put it in a downtown city, and add a heavy dose of weirdness. [This sounds exactly like my kind of …

“While it is well enough to leave footprints on the sands of time, it is even more important to make sure they point in a commendable direction.”
- James Branch Cabell (1879-1958), Author

Kassabaum, Obata + Hellmuth campaign for their earlier selves at HOK’s 25th anniversary celebration in 1980.

Landscape Architect Bob Belden soaks up studio life in the 1960s.

Hong Kong employees burn the midnight oil to celebrate HOK’s silver anniversary in 2005.

For the past several months, HOK people – current and past – have spent considerable time reflecting on our firm’s 55-year …

Last weekend was the big global Pecha Kucha event for Haiti, and St. Louis’ second PK night.  It was a tall order for a new group of volunteer organizers to turn around our second-ever event, 3 weeks after our inauguration into the world of PK, but by all accounts we managed to pull it off, raising over $1000 for Architecture for Humanity.

A mix of Haiti-related and other thought-provoking, inspirational stories made their way to the stage, as you can read in the Beacon’s coverage of the night.  Perhaps even more telling than the descriptions are the amazing photographs taken by one of our super talented Toky friends, Geoff Story.

My favorite part, and the piece that …

So St. Louis just held its first ever PechaKucha night and it was a lot of fun. More than 250 people packed the Foundation.  But I will get back to that in a minute…

What I really want to share is what’s happening next, because it’s ambitious and everyone who has a PechaKucha night in their city needs to come out and support the cause.  February 20th will be a worldwide wave of PK celebrations to support Architecture for Humanity’s rebuilding of Haiti relief efforts.  This is evolving quickly and I will post more updates as plan solidify.  For now,  click here to learn more.

Now, back to PK STL 01…Stone foundation, exposed pipes …

The week ahead will mark the start of a monumental process here in St. Louis as Stage One results are announced for the International Design Competition on Gateway Arch.  For those of you familiar with St. Louis, you know that as astonishing as the Eero Saarinen designed Arch is, its connection with the city and the river is largely fragmented.  You currently have to play frogger over an interstate in order to get the Arch grounds.  And so for the first time in 50 years the National Park Service is revisiting the design with a competition, intending to award “the best from the best” with a commission to build an intervention that …

Pecha Kucha!  Yes, Pecha Kucha Night has finally landed in the STL. Tomorrow night, St. Louis–along with Brussels, Belgium, Durban, South Africa, and a few other cities worldwide–will be celebrating design and creativity, PK-style.

For those of you not already familiar with Pecha Kucha, it’s a fast paced format for artists, entrepreneurs, designers and anyone with big ideas to show them off using 20 slides, 20 seconds each. This is our first shot at this and it promises to be a great night. As one in a team of organizers, I am both nervous and excited.  The worldwide popularity of PK has created some mighty tall shoes to …

Working at HOK, we’re routinely given the opportunity to get involved with charitable and community organizations. Here in the St. Louis office, we’ve been working pro bono with the City of St. Louis and the Animal House Fund to create a new city animal shelter, dubbed the Animal House. The hope is that a nicer facility, combined with a better location, will promote higher adoption rates. The new facility will offer increased capacity as well as a more modern, humane environment for the animals. The design documents are 95% complete and the only thing standing in the way of constructing this facility is funding.

To …

About a year ago, we were fortunate enough to have Rebecca Nolan, Associate AIA, IIDA, LEED AP, join HOK’s St. Louis office as a senior vice president and managing principal. Her one-year anniversary seems the perfect time to spotlight Rebecca in our first Inside the Designer’s Studio post of 2010.

On the “very special kind of ambiguity” that has been designed into HOK:

On the importance of diversity in the practice of design:

On creating an environment for people to do their best work and ”selfless leadership:”

Thanks Rebecca!

Previous edition of ITDS: George Hellmuth – HOK Co-Founder

The New Year should begin with a bang… so Ladies and Gentlemen let me introduce Michelle Pinkston! A landscape designer for the Planning Group who is based in St. Louis, Michelle is a dedicated and incredibly creative team member with an endless supply of positive energy and ideas. Her attitude is infectious and you can’t help but feel inspired to be at your best when working alongside Michelle.

 This graduate of Iowa State University who grew up in rural Iowa could also be a professional seamstress. While most of us struggle with sewing a button, Michelle could create a runway line for cats or tissue box covers for your grandmother. (She also …

Another installment in our series about the inspiring women of HOK (not to say that our men aren’t inspiring, too!): Meet Jeannette Thompson, Business Communications Specialist in the HOK Planning Group. While Jeannette calls St. Louis her home, she supports the HOK network throughout the world. You also know her as one of the Life@HOK blogstar team and future American Idol judge! Jeannette is a true superstar and I hope you enjoy getting to know her a bit better.

Q: What’s a typical day in the life of Jeannette Thompson?

A typical day involves a morning routine that is anything but typical, …

What makes a design great? We posed that question to David Chassin, an architect and SVP who has seen more than his share of great design over 26 years in HOK’s St. Louis office (Yes, he joined the firm when he was 13).

Previous edition of ITDS: Gordon Stratford – Toronto

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 …

This week we received word that our 50th project received LEED certification, and what better way to celebrate than with a big ole pretzel from Gus’ Pretzel Shop, a south St. Louis tradition since 1920.  HOK’s 50thproject to be certified was Herbalife at LA Live, which earned the LEED-CI Certified rating.  This makes the 15th project this year alone to receive certification (plus two BREAAM certified projects).  And we now have 942 employees LEED accredited.  Keep up the good work!

[Information and post content via Chris Trowbridge]

Alright, so we didn’t actually have a pic-a-nic basket like the one Yogi always yearned for, but this past Sunday the HOK St. Louis office did have an office pic-a-nic that would make Yogi jeaous.

A long forgotten tradition for the HOK STL office, the Family Picnic was resumed (after a nine year or greater absence – no one knows for sure) at the behest of Rebecca Nolan, Managing Principal of the office. The rest of the office jumped on board and a committee was formed to begin the planning, which landed us at the Ordnance Shelter at Sylvan Springs Park …

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 Zero Emissions Building design team is using use life’s principles as one filter for potential solutions. During the July 31 charrette, HOK Sustainable Design Director Mary Ann Lazarus described sustainable design ideas from nature generated in a session that included her and Tim Gaidis from HOK and Dr. Dayna Baumeister and Tim McGee from the Biomimicry Guild.

Their suggestions for the larger design team included:

• Consider solutions that are locally attuned and responsive — derived from the local climate and place in St. Louis.

• Use cyclical processes and closed loops (waste = food, for example).

• Optimize rather than maximize. Get the most benefits possible out

…

A while back I posted about the new City Garden here in St Louis. It has continued to be a big hit here in the city and folks still love it! There are wet kids wandering the streets all the time…  Recently there has been a call in the media and in the residents to take advantage of the momentum provided by this great addition to the city and to KEEP BUILDING!

We couldn’t agree more!!! And it’s nice that a quick exercise we did here in the Planning group last year is starting to gain some traction with an article in the STL Beacon(UPDATE: another discussion and post has shown up at …

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 …

HOK St. Louis is working to help the Animal House Fund raise $4 million required to build a new 20,000 square-foot animal shelter for the city of St. Louis. It’s a tough task, but we can do it!! 

In 2001, a 10-year-old boy was attacked by a pack of dogs in a St. Louis city park and later died. Serious concerns suddenly were raised about whether the city’s animal care facilities had proper staffing and adequate resources.

When the current “Animal Regulatory Center” was built in the …

Most of us have had the awkward experience at a grade school dance where everyone lines the walls and looks at his or her own feet.  If we haven’t gotten to experience it first hand, we’ve surely seen it joked about on television or in movies. This timid experience was recently part of HOK St. Louis’ Arts and Education Campaign! The final day of activities was wrapped up with a Happy Hour and Square Dance!

HOK St. Louis employees spent all day eagerly awaiting the moment that they got to use their well rehearsed excuse to NOT dance!  Some of these excuses were:

“I’d be too embarrassed to dance with everyone …

As I mentioned in my previous post, I’m in Portland, Oregon attending the 44th annual SCUP conference.  There are 14 HOKers here from across the U.S. and Canada, and not only are we learning lots and meeting great people, we’re also sharing HOK greatness with the world.

To be specific, HOK greatness includes:

• 2009 National SCUP Campus Planning Award – District Category for the University of Alabama Science and Engineering Precinct Master Plan (Tuscaloosa, Alabama). Accepted by Crystal Barriscale and Paul Woolford (San Francisco) and our University of Alabama Clients, this award recognizes the University’s new precinct which focuses on science and engineering and creates a new pedestrian

…

Thanks to the Planning Group’s season tickets and wonderful lottery system, I was amongst the four lucky winners drawn for the All Star Game!

Except for the exitement of being in the presence of President Obama, the B-2 Bomber, and the “All-Stars Among Us,” it was phenomenal to see the skyline of St. Louis in the background, echoing the lawn mower art on the field in the foreground. After being in Hong Kong and Asia Pacific for three months, I am once again reminded of St. Louis’ potential of becoming a great city.

Pre-game ceremony right before the huge American flag display

The …

The crowds have left, the sponsor vans are hitting the road, and hotdog wrappers are about all that’s left behind. Allstar Game week is sadly over here in St. Louis, but we surely savored every moment of it. I had the opportunity to attend Monday night’s Homerun Derby with my stylish colleague Jaki  thanks to our friends at Fleishman Hillard. We sat about 8 rows off the field and got to see the NL players up close and personal, like our very own – Albert Pujols.

We really enjoyed performances by former American Idol contestant Nikko Smith (Ozzie Smith’s son) and of course my …

You’ve read all about it – on ArchNewsNow it got top billing, of course it’s been all over the St Louis Post Dispatch, it’s been blogged about, youtube’d, etc etc.  And now it’s open! 

No, we in the Planning Group didn’t work on the new sculpture park, Citygarden, in downtown St Louis. It was designed by Nelson Byrd Woltz, a landscape architecture firm based in New York and Charlottesville, but I’m a big enough person to check out a non-HOK project (please don’t let me be struck by lightning) and even enjoy it immensely!

We got the opportunity to walk through the garden before it opened – most of the …

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.