We’re on a road.  It’s not a road to nowhere as the Talking Heads might have thought, it’s a sustainable road.  It’s a long road for us, and somehow, we still seem refreshed and eager to keep on going!  A few summers ago, HOK St. Louis started what is now referred to as “a green feeding” list.  It’s a score card of places that the office uses for catering lunches.  It’s really a great idea the more I think about it.  Where can we make another impact?  By the very thing we do everyday, eating!

The …

I received one of those e-mails that gets sent around to just about anyone who has an e-mail address.  Most of the time I ignore them, but this one I found not only funny, but helpful and ingenious [thanks to fellow engineer David Bruce].  Here are some of the highlights, you can find more at There I Fixed It. 

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If you hang out on Twitter, you may have seen a few Back to the Future tweets about today (or yesterday) being the day in which Marty McFly goes into the future!   I’m not really going to dispute that here (I honestly believe the actual year is 2015, and I also think it should be in October).  My whole point to this blog is about hover-boards!  For those of you that may not remember (or worse, are too young to know), a hover-board is a board much like a skateboard without wheels that was used in Back to the Future II.  It is, as it says, a hovering board that is supposed to be abundant in the near future.  I’m …

Math nerds around the world celebrated a little known, but widely growing holiday called Pi Day.  The St. Louis Structures Group celebrated our 3rd Annual Pi Day on Monday, March 15.

This year’s events included two awards: 1 for the “Best In Show Pie”; 1 for the most recited digits of Pi.

Each recipient recieved a $30 gift card to Pi Pizzera in St. Louis courtesy of the Structures Group!

And the winners were:

Lemonade Pie by Jason Wandersee (of the Justice Group) (recipe below)!

111 digits (including the 3) – Yong Yu (of the Strurctures Group)(Erich Friesen from the Healthcare Group was a very …

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 …

I thought with all of the recent Earthly activity, I’d give a small lecture on earthquakes via the blog.  I’d like to make it clear that I am no seismologist.  I simply went to the Unites States Geological Survey (USGS) to get some info to share with you!  It’s a great resource of information!

Some Interesting Things To Look At…
This “animation” map shows where earthquakes are happening over a period of time, worldwide. 
The USA Earthquake map shows earthquakes in (you guessed it) the US.
By going to the USGS site, you can find out about earthquake myths, like “earthquake weather” and “California falling into the ocean”.
You can even …

I learned about a site today called bookcrossing.com that is the “Where’s George?” for books.  You leave a book for a new person to read, they read it and pass it along where its adventure through the world is tracked online!

The site says the following…

BookCrossing is earth-friendly, and gives you a way to share your books, clear your shelves, and conserve precious resources at the same time. Through our own unique method of recycling reads, BookCrossers give life to books. A book registered on BookCrossing is ready for adventure.

Leave it on a park bench, a coffee shop, at a hotel on vacation. Share it with a

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I feel like a proud parent!  Our little (er -giant) Steven rode 5000 miles in 2009!

It’s quite a feat if you consider the reality of it.  There are many of you that ride your bike, often to and from work (see Jodi’s post); but think about the actual number of miles you rack up!  I’d be happy if I made it to 50 (Tour de France is ~2241 miles)!  Also think about the conditions in which you ride your bike!  Not even cold and mild rain keeps Steven Crang off the double wheeled transporter!

To celebrate his enormous amount of hard work he brought in a Gus’ Pretzel (a St. Louis’ …

With a little encouragement from Rachel Peine I am posting a picture from my breakfast this morning.  You see, in this design intensive industry, when an item is not available to us, we create one…

I used a piece of scrap paper to make a funnel so that I could chocolatize my milk with chocolate powdery goodness!  [Really chocolatize is a word, consult the special edition of my dictionary, not yet on bookshelves].

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]

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 …

We live in a world where the Internet is nearly everywhere we go. 

This means blogs are also nearly everywhere we go!  We can start at our own blog and click a link in the blogroll in order to weave through as many blogs as our brains can handle.  Sometimes it’s to see things like this or that!  Sometimes we learn things we didn’t know yesterday!  Sometimes we learn nothing at all and the only things gained are exercised eyes! 

I have certainly read enough blogs for the entire state of Illinois.  I’ve learned a lot from blogs too!  For instance, as mathy (one of my great made up …

They may not look like what you would first imagine. 

They may not look like anything TV makes them out to be. 

But they are . . .

the St. Louis HOK Biker Gang!
 
  

[It may be necessary to say "the St. Louis HOK Biker Gang!" in your best dramatic theatrical voice over; go ahead, try it again, I'll wait]

[l-r: Seth Teel, Jason Kerensky, Paul Wilhelms, Derek Prior, Brett Kostial, Tim Gaidis]

[l-r: Jon Cohen, JoAnn Brookes, Bruce Brunner, Derek Prior, Seth Teel,
Brett Kostial, Matt Snelling, Jason Kerensky, Tim Gaidis, Mark Rosen,
Paul Wilhelms, Steven Crang,

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I have to admit that I didn’t really know what an engineer was until late in high school when I started looking at colleges.  Even then I wasn’t sure what an engineer did, I only knew they took a lot of math classes.  That seemed right up my alley so I pursued it.  Now, years later, it’s what I do, I have a better understanding of what an engineer does (or so you all hope), and I …