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 …

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 …

The Zero Emissions Building virtual design team had another fantastic session yesterday, with team members from St. Louis, San Francisco, Toronto, Chicago and Berkeley using Advanced Collaboration Rooms (STL and SF) and Thunder Virtual Flipchart desktop software to collaborate on their exploration of the building’s core configuration, massing, daylighting, parking, slab thickness and skin.

Right at the end of the session, the connection dropped, and nobody could see or hear each other. So the team said their goodbyes on the virtual flipcharts.

The team is still marching onward toward zero …

Certain HOK-ers (ahem, John Gilmore ) have been bragging about HOK’s very cool new collaboration technology: the Advanced Collaboration Room, which combines Cisco Telepresence Technology and Polyvision Thunder Express.  Well, John, you are no longer the only cool kid in town!  The WDC office became the fourth HOK office to open it’s ACR for business.  St. Louis, San Francisco, and Toronto already had them…next on the list are Houston, Los Angeles, and London.

After a few solid weeks of construction, the ACR was ready for …

You know you’ve been anxiously awaiting our second installment of 5 Questions for HOKers.  Today’s feature is Esther Simon, the one and only prickly pear of HOK. 

Q: Tell us about your background.

A: I came to the United States from Israel about 30 years ago.  I have a great desire to be part of a larger community – I think this desire was formed in Israel, where there was a great sense of community due in part

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Last week it was our turn to be trained on using the new Advanced Collaboration Room that we’ve watched being built  here over the past several weeks. These rooms are sprouting up in HOK offices across the world, but for now the only ones up and running are here in St. Louis and in San Francisco. For our training session they put the Corporate legal and communications teams together. I.T. gurus Jonathan Chung and John Bartolomi joined the videoconference from San Francisco so we could have somebody to collaborate with on the other end.
 
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