These days, it isn’t easy to land a job interview. But Daphne O’Leary recently broke through the clutter to score an important meeting with HOK Alaska HR Manager Rob Pilkington.

See how Daphne fares in this dramatic depiction of her interview experience.

Any similarities to actual individuals – real or imagined – are purely intentional.

Hey Everyone,

Check out entries from Aflac’s ‘10 Seconds Challenge’ and vote for your favorite. I’ve got some friends who have entered here and I think you should vote for them  because they are awesome. VOTE HERE!

The Jean Canfield Government of Canada Building, designed by HOK in joint venture with Bergmark Guimond Hammarlund Jones in PEI, delivers on the federal government’s pledge to embrace new technologies, methodologies, partners, and means of delivering service to Canadians. Thoughtfully planned, the JC building has revitalized an underused neighbourhood, uses design to reflect the local flavour of the community, encourages employees and residents alike to use the space and sets the standard for environmentally-progressive government buildings.

The following video explores how the design team successfully met the federal government’s objectives of sustainability, supportive work environments, and connectivity, and highlights HOK’s integrated design approach to the project.

Click to …

Like any cinematic production, our video experiment at Greenbuild ‘09 elicited a fair share of blooper moments. We’ve compiled a few outtakes and humorous quips below.

Check out a complete selection of Green Aha! moments on YouTube and Life at HOK.

Wow. I am sorry. Looks like I went missing for awhile there.  It’s a long sordid tale of pirates and space travel and problem-solving and saving small children from hungry giants, which I’ll get into at a later date.

In the meantime, check out this video I’m currently obsessed with. It’s of a fantastic song called Two Weeks by the band Grizzly Bear.  The graphics are ridiculous (I’m about as jealous of this Gabe character’s skills as I am of the renderers here in our DC office) – make sure you make it to minute 3:35.  Enjoy!

(thanks to dooce.com for alerting me of this rad vid)

Last Thursday, the Chicago office of HOK opened its doors to the professional design community, which included clients, engineers, contractors, brokers, product representatives, present and past colleagues and, of course, our friends. The already warm and inviting space was further transformed into a cool, sophisticated yet festive environment.

I had the pleasure of interviewing and chatting with a few of the participants. Unfortunately, I also had the opportunity of participating in a charity raffle that was won almost exclusively by our St. Louis guests. Regardless, the big winners that night were truly the charity as well as the designers of this wonderful work space.

We will post a series of video clips from the shindig!

Dhaval Barbhaya came to St. Louis from India to get his master’s degree in urban design and planning from Washington University and we’re thankful that he never left (except for those dozens of trips back and forth to India for project work). For most of his eight years at HOK, Dhaval has been one of the team leaders for the amazing Lavasa project, which is a series of compact villages rising along the water’s edge of several thousand acres in the mountainous Western Ghats region between Mumbai and Pune.

India’s DNA Money just ran a story on the Lavasa project in which Ajit Gulabchand, chairman and managing director of Hindustan Construction Co Ltd (HCC), says, “It’s time to stop calling …

I was so inspired by the popularity of visualizations of economic madness, inspired by Jodi, of course, that I decided to post up something that is nothing less than awesome. It’s an 11 min. video visualization by Jonathan Jarvis explaining how this mess came to be. We are already ‘knee-deep’ but NOW I understand!!

Enjoy.

via Simplicity/Complexity

Came across this amazing video from diagonal-view recently. Great video site with lots of cool random inventions, from underwater motorbikes, weird umbrella, air-conditioned jacket to world’s fastest office.

Nicola Greenaway, a director in HOK’s LEED-certified Singapore office, grew up in New Zealand and also has worked in the London and Hong Kong studios. She better not move again soon — her mother finally knows exactly what she does!

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Steve Ma’s post on HOK’s Hong Kong office achieving LEED Gold certification gave a shout out to Hong Kong ”sustainable design guru Peggy Chu.” So it seems like the right time to finally feature Peggy in Inside the Designer’s Studio.

In this first clip Peggy talks about sustainable design: “Let’s just do it!”

In this one she describes the pace of development in Asia:

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Our ITDS inspiration!

HOK Toronto design architect Todd Macyk thinks back to his first time: a Brutalist concrete block building in Saskatoon. “I was intrigued by my revulsion for it,” says Todd. 

That’s Joshua Bridie, a senior interior designer in HOK’s San Francisco office.

Riccardo Mascia talks about sustainable design as a common value that binds all of HOK. “We’re going to leave all these buildings and this environment to the next generation and it would be unconscionable of us to think otherwise.”

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Yiselle Marie Santos is a vibrant young architect and prolific Life at HOK blogger interested in exploring both science and design. Hailing from Puerto Rico, she practices her craft in the DC studio. I love how Yiselle says “guttural!”

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This final 2008 edition of Inside the Designer’s Studio (ITDS) features Internet sensation and proud Canadian (via San Antonio) Justin Zawyrucha, the Toronto-based Life at HOK blogger who ranks way up there in terms of having the most interesting posts, widest following and hardest last name to spell. Sorry we made you stare into the sun for the interview, Justin!

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So this is one of the best things I’ve seen of 2008. A couple of architects in the HOK Atlanta office, Scott Fleming and David Nilsson made a video a couple years ago and just decided to show it two me a few days ago. The gaul!! These guys were totally holding back on me, but kudos for this unbelivable spoof of the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage video.

Here is the description Scott gave of the whole purpose;

“After years of boring power point presentations at our company retreats we decided to do something a bit more creative. The presentations were supposed to be informative and discuss what was going on in the studio. The following video tracks my struggles to get …

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.”

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Exploring the seemingly infinite amount of video footage jamming up our server, I stumbled across interviews shot by Emma and Colin at the Washington Univesity School of Medicine Farrell Learning and Teaching Center while visiting St. Louis last October. These bold young filmmakers conducted a couple of impromptu, guerilla-style interviews with Life at HOK Godfather Tom Polucci, who designed the amazing space they were standing in, as well as with an unsuspecting but ultra-accommodating medical student who had made the naive mistake of attempting to study undisturbed.

“This holiday season it’s all about the bling!”

It’s the most-dreaded season of the year for creative agencies: Yep, it’s Holiday Card Time.  Watch what happened at AKQA NY.

If I had known this was a real profession I might have become a famous Title Designer instead of an unknown, struggling, former Interior Designer.  Karin Fong , Imaginary Forces, spoke at a Conference last May and every now and then i watch her Herman Miller ‘Get Real’ video  (play video to watch) when I need to see something inspiring. Her video for Herman Miller is clever, catchy and visually beautiful.  One of my favourite bits of video….with my favourite furniture.  enjoy.

Toby Bath is managing director of HOK’s Asia-Pacific practice. In these clips Toby talks about connectivity driven by density and the emergence of sustainable design in Asia-Pacific.

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Life at HOK blogger Todd Macyk is a senior design architect in HOK’s Toronto studio. His practice and style are heavily influenced by his background in the visual arts, which includes studying sculpture and photography.

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As part of HOK’s Advance Strategies team in DC, Jodi is a rock star designer of brilliant strategies. She is an urban planner/programmer (AICP and LEED AP), and is inspired by helping others make a difference in their facilities and practices. Jodi blogs here at Life at HOK and over at The Green Workplace.

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Hello! I’m very happy!! This is my first post on the HOK LIFE BLOG and I want to say hi to all of you from the Singapore HOK Office!!!

In my first post I want to share a classic video with all of you! It is from the Eames office, done some decades ago, for sure a lot of you know it already… but still,whenever I watch it feel amazed by the power of those CEROS one after the other.

From the universe to the electron… does it matter really? What role do we play in this world? What are we doing here? And again… Does it really matter???

I think the power of this video is that it shows you how to relativize everything… cause …

Yiselle posted on her DC colleague Bill Hellmuth yesterday, so it seems like a good time to bring to life HOK’s president here with a new edition of Inside the Designer’s Studio.

Bill believes HOK is just beginning to scratch the surface of its possibilities:

In this clip he touches on a theme from the Washington Business Journal story – working locally and internationally:

Here Bill points out that no other firm has such a wide range of project types:

And then Bill talks about one of those current projects – OQYANA World First, a fully master-planned elite island community development off the coast of Dubai:

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Big week this week…well all of them are big weeks, but this week especially because of the video. Over 430 visited the video, while eight viewed my other content. Anyway, that’s beside the point. I want to thank everyone for their comments, both positive and negative, about the video. I’ve heard that the Houston office was a little jealous at how ‘cool’ the Toronto office is, and there may be other spin-off videos from the Atlanta and Tampa offices. I think this comment summarizes my response to that:

Jessica T e-mailed me: ‘Now I know why you’re always here, you live here!”

Well Jessica, it’s no joke. Thanks for writing in. After graduating University, I lived in a bachelor apartment …

With HOK Chicago’s move just one month away, we’re doing a lot of housekeeping and purging around the office. Although the yellow hue that permeates the plastic of our old fax machine belies the many good times that we shared over the past 12 years, we just don’t think the old girl is gonna make the trip with us to the new space. A tribute video is definitely called for. Enjoy. (Thank you Brandon Wojcik for filming and editing – after work hours).

A blogger known as “The Cranky Flier” shot photos and video of the new Indianapolis International Airport terminal designed by HOK. The terminal welcomed its first arrival last night and today is the first full day of operations. Take a look at Cranky’s lens work.

HOK San Francisco Design Director Paul Woolford on getting paid to play and ideas that last!

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