May has arrived, and as you may remember, May is Bike to Work Month.  Just like last year, the Cascade Bicycle Club is sponsoring the 2010 Group Health Commute Challenge.

And HOK is ready to go with already over 100 riders signed up across the firm. We so far have 13 teams across 12 offices, setting us up to outperform ourselves from last year. And that’s no small feat. To refresh your memory, HOK ranked 19th out of 737 organizations in total miles riden (7590 total miles). That’s a lot of fuel saved, calories burned, stories made, lives changed, lessons learned…(read some of last year’s posts!).

If you haven’t yet signed up, it’s not too late! You can register well into the …

Janet just wrote a couple days ago about Republic, a bike builder with online customization. Since I know many bikers there are at HOK, I thought this might be a nice entry.

Janet lives in Toronto (and as a former HOK employee, we miss you Janet!), it reminded me of this awesome graphic showing public transportation options for the Toronto office (below) when it won a SMART Environments award in Metropolis.

I’m pretty sure it’s imperative that if you work in the Toronto office, you have to be cool. Since everyone I’ve met from there is …

Seattle, how to describe Seattle.  Let’s start with its inspirational setting.  Water, land, and air collide in every way imaginable, all within a short radius of Seattle’s center.  Being situated in the midst of tectonic plate chaos has resulted in some magnificent mountains and volcanoes visible from all parts of the city.  Being so far north has allowed for some incredible glacial cutting, effectively carving out the Puget Sound and many of the surrounding lakes.  Then there’s ever lush vegetation fed through rain forest magnitudes of precipitation, which mixed with the unique chiseled topography creates the recipe for unequivocal beauty.  This is why we live here and it is through …

Art collector Dakis Joannou has enlisted Jeff Koons and a crew of contemporary artists to create the most original sight on the seas.

Anyone cruising the Aegean should be warned that fantastically colorful, wildly eccentric apparition cutting across your bow is not a mirage. It’s Guilty, Dakis Joannou’s new boat.Koons and the boat’s interior designer, Ivana Porfiri, broke free of classic nautical architecture and gave birth to what their delighted patron calls “a totally magical object.” The exterior paint was inspired by Roy Lichtenstein’s mermaid for the America’s Cup racing boat competition that is now become a permanent collection at …

Todd, I thought you might enjoy this since your last post was about cycling and being cycle-sensitive (like Copenhagen). MIT’s SENSEable City lab has introduced a new initiative for Copenhagen called CopenCycle. The overall goal of the project it seems is to look beyond the questions of ‘what’ we should be doing and saying, ‘now that we are doing it (it being cycling) what are the implications on society and technology’.

‘Smart-Biking’ is about taking our innovations of ’social technologies’  and advancing them toward a cultural and transportation shift, such as biking in urban environments. The ’smart tags’ will provide not only a connection to your friends via facebook application to …