It is with great excitement that METROPOLIS Magazine has announced our HOK / Vanderweil team as winners of the 2011 Next Generation Design Competition: “Get the Feds to Zero.” Our project team consisted of 11 designers from HOK and 4 engineers from Vanderweil, all with less than 10 years of professional experience.  Our team addressed a 1965 Los Angeles federal office building, and proposed modernization strategies to achieve a Zero Environmental Footprint.

Achieving a Zero Environmental Footprint requires deep reductions in building energy and water loads, changes in occupant behavior, integrated building systems and onsite renewable energy generation. Successful realization is the result of a fully integrated design and multi-disciplinary collaboration. 

Through our three-month development process, we focused on research, design integration and schematic design. While our entry to the competition features this singular building, it is this process of addressing existing buildings that we hope gains real traction. Only by addressing unique and local issues can existing buildings be modernized to achieve such standards. As the government considers how to modernize its multi-million square feet of building stock, it has the distinct opportunity to lead industry standards. In the words of Martha Johnson, “Try new things, take risks, and be bold.  Use the tools that we develop together. Find new partners and leave no stone unturned.”

Please congratulate this fantastic team: Alesia Call, Anica Landreneau, Antony Yen, Brandon Harwick, Colin Benson, Iyabo Lawal, Jarek Bieda, John Jackson, Ming Hu, Monika Kumor, Patrick Murphy, Scott Walzak, Sean Quinn, Sean Williams and Stephen Lahti. We’re honored to receive this award, and we look forward to sharing more of the process and voices of the designers who completed this work in the coming days. Stay tuned!