The New Year always causes one to reflect on the recent past, but especially so today, the two-year anniversary of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti. I have been fortunate to work with a dedicated group of volunteers at HOK to design a children’s center and orphanage in Port-au-Prince. Earlier this week, we presented our latest design to the client, Fondation Enfant Jesus, as well as to the U.S. Green Building Council. The results were very positive.

Our collective goal to create a nurturing and restorative place is taking shape. In many ways, though, this project is more difficult than the large, complex projects we face every day at HOK. We are striving for net zero water and waste and for the building to provide a net positive energy source – all with a design that also celebrates the amazing Haitian arts and crafts culture. Because we do not want to import materials and technologies that create a barrier to replication, we are returning to basic principles of passive design: reducing building demand as much as possible and then using limited solar and wind entrainment to make up the rest.

We have developed the design’s core principles around a balance of social, economic and environmental concerns. HOK’s design team is using biomimicry to create a locally attuned, responsive building. Biomimicry teaches us that a greater understanding of the commonalities between adaptions in a biome can serve as a guide for place-based design. Selective pressures are a biological term that describes the biotic (living) and abiotic (non-living) forces that drive change in a system. There are few places where non-living forces have wrought so much change as in Haiti.

Because 80 percent of the Haitian population lives below poverty levels, the biotic forces at play here are powerful. Over the past 100 years, forest cover has nearly vanished in Haiti, going from 60 percent to just 2 percent. The associated ecosystem services have been stripped, resulting in systemic problems caused by erosion and loss of nutrient cycling. To help restore this system, this project will leverage cyclical processes and a closed-loop resource strategy.

Biomimicry became more visible in the project after the team developed an understanding of the intended performance of the building (challenge), the strategies found in nature (solution space) and then translated the abstraction into built form.

The local builders mix concrete by hand with a bucket, and in the past have constructed structures that are not strong enough to withstand an earthquake. We are taking cues from nature to improve this process. These structures, for example, heat up in the sun. Some plant leaves create boundary layers to prevent desiccation, and certain barks have low emissivity layers that reject heat. Our goal is to establish a second building layer that keeps the concrete core cool to the touch while promoting the air movement that allows for the skin’s evaporative cooling.

Our design inspiration is found in a keystone species, the Kapok tree, which holds a powerful meaning in Haitian culture. It has practical, medicinal uses and spiritual meaning through the connection of earth to sky. The visible translation occurs in the branching support system of the building’s balcony system as well as in the low emissivity, heat shedding characteristics of its second skin. Leonardo da Vinci observed the branching system of trees, where the mother limb is twice the area of the daughter limb branched pair. This simple empirical formula guides the design of the diagrid facing the courtyard.

The Kapok is an adapted and emergent tree, meaning that in many areas of the world it rises above the rainforest canopy. Extending the visible and literal tree-like diagrid to the metaphor of the entire building is an important aspect of a passive building that needs tending, as the children will become participants in the life of the building. The below-grade area will serve as the building’s “roots,” cleaning and storing water and recycling nutrients from waste into biogas for cooking. The first three stories will function as the structure’s “trunk.” Protecting the building like tree bark, a “boundary layer” will shield exterior walkways and vertical surfaces from direct sunlight while allowing for daylighting and natural ventilation. Rooftop gardens will serve as the “foliage,” supporting the solar energy system and providing additional green space.

This large idea is supported by many small elements related to how the people will use this building every day. Mopping floors in the shaded and ventilated surfaces, for example, provides perceived cooling and surface temperature reduction experienced through bare feet. Vertical green walls flanking the main stair have perches for endemic epiphytes (air plants), and we are suggesting that each adopting parent bring a plant to add to the wall. The rooftop garden includes beds for urban farming.

The new children’s center is taller than most of the buildings around it, and we hope it will be a model for a new ‘emergent’ approach to building in Haiti.

Read past posts about Project Haiti.

Support Project Haiti.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As a vice president in HOK’s Seattle studio, Thomas Knittel, AIA, LEED AP, is passionately committed to sustainable architecture. He holds a Master in Design Studies from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Chip Crawford, director of the HOK Planning Group

The Smarter Planet blog took time out of their busy agenda to catch up with our very own Chip Crawford yesterday as part of their innovation/pure genius blog. The Q+A covers everything from his early interests in the field of Landscape Architecture to the latest thinking around the HOK effect and FIT.  I know that we all think the world is smarter with Chip in it…cool to see other big thinkers do too!  Check it out here.

I have always thought of HOK as a passport to opportunities and I have certainly been one of the most fortunate to somehow find my way into some really incredible places.  My trip last week to the Meeting of the Minds conference in Boulder amazed me with the best of them. 

YES….the conference was awesome.  Each speaker more inspiring than the last…sharing their views with everything there is to know about transportation/technology/smart cities/sustainability/and then some.  Here’s a link to a post covering the conference on the Sustainable Cities Collective blog and link to videos of the presentations. 

But one of the best parts of the whole adventure was the work in preparation for the conference…and a little behind the scenes MotM we managed to pull off while we were there.  

Ann Althoff, our super client catalyst, worked her magic to assemble a power house team of thought leaders from Cisco/IBM/GE/NREL/Autodesk/Buro Happold/and Biomimicry 3.8.  We had a 3-hour strategy session on how we can integrate our expertise and industries to solve the biggest challenges our cities face.  Steve Morton, clearly one of the most brilliant strategists at HOK, cooked up an idea for the reverse RFP [rRFP] that could bring us together again around a real project to take these ideas and make them reality. And Jeannette Thompson, our behind the scenes social media specialist, created our first QR-code enabled card set and blog to get the dialogue started [all done in the time you read this!].

ANYWAY…this meeting of the minds at the meeting of the minds was a very special place to be…the concept of these major players coming together in a more integrated way is exhilarating…and I can’t say enough about these three HOKer’s and the effort they put in to make HOK be a player in that game…[talk about Life at HOK!]

The Metropolis Next Generation entry has garnered another award: 2011 AIA-DC Unbuilt Award.  The 2011 Washington UNBUILT Awards Program recognizes excellence in projects that to date remain unbuilt – theoretical and unbuilt commissioned projects.  Congratulations again to the HOK / Vanderweil Design Team!

Integral to the development of this project was a balance between energy conservation measures and design aesthetics.  While this goal may seem evident, available technologies create a unique challenge for designers to marry these two principles.  It took great strides to move from research into development, and formalize gestures into 3D Vizualizations that were recently featured at Design DC, where the AIA-DC Unbuilt Awards were announced.

The final renderings are a result of the tremendous efforts of Jarek Bieda and Colin Benson, DC’s Vizualization Specialists, who drew from the exterior design of Scott Walzak, atria design of Ming Hu and Monika Kumor, and interior design of Antony Yen.  In a mere four days, Jarek and Colin deftly translated these distinct models into visualizations that gave reality to our concepts.  Sitting down with Jarek, I learned more about their process. 

Sean Quinn: What drew you to work on this project?

Jarek Bieda: Our Visualization Lab is involved in most of the projects in the DC office, so it was natural that we helped out on this one too.  Even though we only had 4 days before the deadline, we worked intensely and delivered the images everyone was happy with.

SQ: What was your involvement and experience on the project?

JB: The goal for us was to take the very conceptual computer models created by the design team and turn them into detailed visuals that will help to make the idea seem realistic and exciting.  The 3D models we were given were basic but we also received a lot of detailed instruction about how it “should” look.  This helped us to define what we are trying to visualize.

SQ: What would you like to see brought into your regular project workload?

JB: We would be very excited to help develop the idea further, possibly building some physical models of the algae panels and work with the team to assist in system research and further the design process.

I had been back barely a week from my fun-filled water safari in Jeddah when conferences and meetings called once again and I packed my barely dried clothes, hopped on the Eurostar train and made it across to Paris where I was to chair the ULI European Sustainable Development council.

This time though I was happily not on my own. Our very own Chip Crawford was kindly with me as a speaker for the ULI Paris conference on my European Sustainable Development Council. Covering a wide range of topics from Bovis Lend Lease’s corporate sustainability strategy and how it affected their own developments to socio-economics of new communities and finally last but most definitely not least…FIT, which went like the proverbial storm.

Chip at the Detroit Workshop

It’s very satisfying when you see an audience truly engage with an alternative approach and begin to think about issues that they hadn’t really considered.

A little more reflection time would have of course been welcome, but our Eurostar train left at 6am the next day to return to London. We were leaving Paris, to come to London to discuss Detroit. As some of my American colleagues would say…”Go figure”.

I don’t often feel moved to write about an event that I’ve been to, nor am I a particular proponent of the movement that says we can learn some of our best lessons of urban regeneration from our American neighbours. This time though, it was different.

The Happold Consulting and WAN joint workshop on Detroit and heard and discussed how the local population, or what’s left of it, are getting involved in shaping the future direction of their city straight from the people on the front line, in this case Deputy Director of the City of Detroit Planning and Development Department Marja Winters.

Marja Winters

Workshops filled with experts, in this case ranging from Peter Murray as the chair to Piers Gough, Juliet Davis from the LSE, Peter Bishop and Clive Dutton, can be top down affairs, but this tended to be the opposite, as those who still live there had told their leaders what they wanted to begin with and we were there to flesh out and offer case studies and suggestions based on our experience on other ways that the community can be brought together. Liverpool and Manchester and HOK’s and Chip’s own experience in our home town of St Louis were all brought up as examples of this.

Piers Gough & Peter Murray

The circumstances leading to this community action if a little extreme are rather simple. Sometimes it takes a cataclysmic event to get a community to pull together, or in the case of Detroit, a leaking population that over the past 60 years has halved the number of inhabitants, left one of the highest unemployment rates in the US and an urban fabric that is literally unravelling year after year, leaving behind empty lots, burnt out buildings and rapidly emptying downtown neighbourhoods.

Without government intervention, in some cities this would be it, with the local government perhaps hanging out a sign asking the last citizen to leave to turn out the lights, but not in Detroit.

An urban grain that is more characterised by voids than built form has given over to a scenario where empty lots have been rejuvenated into city parks and urban agriculture projects, whilst run down and half-derelict buildings become community art projects, all very much spear-headed by residents who aren’t ready to give up on the home of the motor car. But as with all of these types of city wide projects, planning and consultation fatigue is a real danger no matter how pro-active the locals are, which is why this time the framework that is being jointly developed by Happolds and the city must work, there might not be second chance.

"Turn off the lights before you leave..."

I’ve always liked that statement.  There is a certain poetry to it.

There is also a certain poetry to a bike itself.  It is a model of integrated design and thinking.  Elegance of design, simplicity, refinement.    Resopnsive and adaptable. Functional yet exhilerating.    Sustainable, recyclable, efficient and practical.  An engagement of all the senses – movement, sound, tactile sensation.  Moreover, on the opertational side, are a series of individual parts, all performing at their optimum, to ensure success.   And at the centre of it all – often overlooked by many architects and designers – is the person.   Clearly, the bike is indeed a model we may choose to look to, when it comes to D E S I G N thinking and integration at HOK.

BTW – this is my ever blog . . . so I look forward to your feedback and future discussions here at the life and times of HOK!   I will try to write weekly on whatever topic seems appropriate, and if nothing relevant is happening, then at the very least, you might get last night’s dinner recipe.

Cheers

Jonathan

Following our First Annual FIT Gathering last November in Chicago, a number of us have been thinking a lot about what is next and how we might apply some of the amazing Fully Integrated Thinking [FIT] that surfaced at the event. One of the really interesting potentials that we witnessed was the ability to apply FIT to an organization. Imagine a FIT HOK!!!

To get there, we are taking a look at how our Planning Group is organized and how we can ‘optimize’ the connectivity of our network of 16 locations…and what organizational influences we should look at to ‘adapt and evolve’ to the next level of performance. There are many factors to consider, including the critical issues of financial performance and design excellence.

ANYWAY…as I stumbled my way thru a zillion interesting bodies of research in an effort to ‘diagram’ some possibilities…I came across Aaron Koblin’s recent work. I am sure you may already know of him. He has been working in digital media and has created some of the most informative art I have ever seen, like the one he shows of the flight patterns across the world.

We’ve been posting a lot lately on this blog about inspiring views towards systems thinking and better understanding the data all around us. Think about all the methods we use to communicate our design ideas…I can only imagine the future possibilities for HOK and our ‘mediums of the future.’ Aaron Koblin’s collaborative art project and shareware methodologies provide an incredible example for HOK to learn from.  If Fully Integrated Thinking is rooted in the Biomimicry Guild’s Life’s Principles, and is ultimately the convergence of design and data, then Aaron just taught me amazing new lenses to view the data…and especially learn from it…in a fun medium called ART!

Enjoy.chip

This was a big week and it ended with a harmonious treat.  I got to go to Chicago to participate in a day-long pre-Greenbuild conference of our own making to review, learn from and evolve our latest thinking  to come out of our collaboration with the Biomimicry Guild.  To unwind, I sat down and watched Super Nanny and What Would You Do? and just when I had had enough ‘reality’…Nate (my thrisis-savior soulmate/husband) flips the channel and we were sucked into some beautiful imagery of the world with Prince Charles talking about living more sustainably, returning to organic farming, building cities to be more life-friendly.

It was all sounding wonderfully familiar and I started yelling at the TV (which i often do) about how we at HOK are on this and don’t they know about Biomimicry?!? When noneother than Janine Benyus, co-founder of the Biomimicry Guild, herself starts talking. There she was in HD on the big screen…the rockstar of helping the world rediscover nature’s genius.  We were just together in Chicago and here she was in Prince Charles’ movie of all things.  Pretty cool!  If you didn’t catch the premiere tonight on NBC, this is a beautiful, informational and very inspirational documentary…check it out.  And for even more inspiration, check out all the ‘net positive’ ideas we gathered for our new poll while at Greenbuild.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We had 12 other wonderful presentations at PK Night, some of which you can find here.  In addition to some great photography here, we also had the wonderful surprise of a sketch artist in our midst who captured another lively presentation and posted on his blog, here.  It’s funny because as one of the volunteer organizers, we worry about who we’re going to get to photograph, video, about sound quality and lighting.  We live in such a digital age, I hope we never lose the art and value of good old fashioned hand-to-paper sketch and color.  Enjoy!

A regenerative HOK would be our greatest contribution to sustainability.
 

Our clients clearly need this and I know if we listen carefully we can lead in new ways we never knew before. Innovative thinking — from wherever it comes — is the soul of HOK.

We have a very special alliance with our friends at the Guild…and we need to better leverage it.

Enjoy…