HOK designers in New York, St. Louis and Atlanta are using virtual meetings with their University at Buffalo (UB) client team to improve the design process for UB’s new School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus.

The seven-story medical school will bring 2,000 UB faculty, staff and students daily to downtown Buffalo and, at more than 500,000 square feet, will be one of the largest buildings constructed in Buffalo in decades.

Three days after Hurricane Sandy barreled into the East Coast last October, HOK’s project team was scheduled to have a meeting with medical school dean Michael E. Cain, MD, and UB’s project steering committee. Jim Berge, AIA, HOK’s director of Science + Technology in New York and principal-in-charge for the project, was stranded at home in Norwalk, Conn., with no power or Internet connection. Berge was able to make his way to a local café, where he connected a smartphone to his cable Wi-Fi service to create his own Wi-Fi hotspot. This allowed him to use his iPad as both a video link and an audio communication device while participating in the meeting through a WebEx connection.

The rest of the UB team members joined the meeting from four different cities the way they have been getting together on most Friday mornings since the project began last June: through ultra-high-resolution Cisco videoconferencing technology installed in dedicated Advanced Collaboration Rooms (ACRs) in HOK’s New York, St. Louis and Atlanta offices. The client team joins from an ACR built in HOK’s field office, a converted 20-person conference room in UB’s Farber Hall.

“The pictures are clear and the communication that takes place in these video meetings is invaluable,” says Jeff Strohmeyer, AIA, a senior laboratory planner in HOK’s St. Louis office.

A typical trip from HOK’s office in New York City to Buffalo is three hours each way. From St. Louis and Atlanta, getting to Buffalo and back is a five-hour journey. Factor in the cost of airfare, car rental, hotel rooms and travel expenses – and multiply that by eight to 10 people for some meetings – and the savings are considerable.

“The investment required to set up the ACR at the university was recovered in just a few months through reduced travel times and costs,” says Berge.

“We also minimize our carbon footprint by reducing our air travel,” adds Bill Odell, FAIA, who directs HOK’s global Science + Technology group from the firm’s St. Louis office

Most importantly, the ACRs are enabling design team members to develop better design solutions because they can get the information and client input they need, when they need it.

“This is a fast-track project within an aggressive schedule,” notes Berge. “Having access to the university’s dean and his team is crucial to ensuring that this building is complete on time.”

“Collaborating through the ACRs allows us to schedule smaller, more focused meetings instead of waiting to get together in person,” says Kimberly Robidoux, LEED AP, who has led several virtual work sessions for the programming of UB’s medical education spaces from HOK’s ACR in Atlanta. “The visual cues I get from people on the screen help me understand whether what I am saying is resonating.”

“The videoconferences have conserved time, energy and expense,” adds Suzanne Laychock, senior associate dean for faculty affairs and facilities in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology at UB. “The personal interactions have been as dynamic as if everyone was seated in the same room and it is easy to share ideas and images.”

As effective as these ACR meetings are, HOK’s team members are emphatic that virtual conversations should not replace in-person meetings – face time is still important.

“You still the need those face-to-face connections to get to know each other and build relationships,” says Kenneth Drucker, FAIA, design director in HOK’s New York office and design principal for the UB project. “But once those personal relationships are established, the ACR becomes an incredibly important tool. It allows us to collaborate fluidly and seamlessly among our different offices and with UB.”

HOK also is leading the design of the Singapore Chancery, an infill building under construction in New York City. The client’s team uses the ACR in HOK’s Singapore office for project meetings with HOK’s New York-based design team.

“Our use of ACRs is a huge firm-wide success story in terms of allowing us to work smarter and design better solutions for clients,” says Drucker. “What’s next – holograms?”

Whether it’s waking up to a surprise spring snowstorm in Beijing or being served fried baby eel at lunch, what HOK’s Chris Fannin most enjoys about living in Asia is “responding to the unexpected on an almost hourly basis.”

Chris, who moved from St. Louis to Hong Kong in 2010, wears three hats for HOK. He is part of the management team leading the firm’s Asia Pacific practice, he leads the region’s planning practice and, with Suzette Goldstein, he is co-director of HOK’s global planning practice. As Chris moves between these three overlapping roles, he says each enriches the other. “We have so much going on in Asia Pacific. It’s incredibly exciting.”

What is a typical day like for you?

CF: On a typical Monday, I get up early, go for a walk-run up the Peak and then put my twin seven-year-old boys on the bus at 8 a.m. I participate in our AP management meeting at 9 a.m. and then, with Yan Wang, my planning partner in China, participate in a 10:15 a.m. call with our Shanghai and Beijing planning studios. We have a Hong Kong planning team meeting at 12:30 p.m. At 4 p.m., I often head to the airport to fly somewhere in Asia. Later in the evening, I have a firm-wide planning leadership, planning congress or HOK board call that wraps up between midnight and 1 a.m. In the gaps between these meetings, I do design and proposal reviews.

That is a typical marathon Monday, which is the day I look forward to the most. It’s the day that I get to plug into the fine-grained scale of our projects all the way up to the local, regional and global aspects of our firm.

What is unique about working in Asia?

Building relationships through persistent face-to-face interaction with clients is incredibly important. The overlap of business and socialization is very thick. It is in this context that clients get to know and trust us as equally vested partners.

We do a lot of work helping our Asian clients position themselves with the government so they can purchase or change designations of land. We use design to help our clients prove the value of the land and to demonstrate the contributions their development will make to society.

There is an intellectual enrichment that comes from working all over Asia. We are able to extract ideas from one market or country and apply them to others. By working across such a spectrum of biomes, geographies and project types, we have inherent opportunities for the cross fertilization that leads to great innovation. Our team in Asia has people from 14 nationalities and we have a distinct knack for collaboration.

How important is sustainability in Asia?

Sustainable planning and design has an incredibly large, positive impact here because of the vast scale of the projects. We take this responsibility very seriously. Our clients presume that the projects are sustainable – this is one reason they come to us. Nobody has to say to say the word.

Water-related issues are critical in Asia. Most of our projects are associated with a river or ocean. The Yangtze River, for example, has historically defined the growth of China. Many cities that turned their backs on the river over time now are re-engaging it.

Yan Wang is leading the re-design of the northern part of the city of Taizhou along the Yongning River. As with many of our projects, our design uses the public realm along the river’s edge as a structural piece of infrastructure. It helps clean the stormwater runoff from adjacent districts, improving the river’s water quality street by street within a 20-square-kilometer area.

We have been working on Fully Integrated Thinking processes and bioinspired design strategies that are culturally attuned to Asian culture. A team in our Hong Kong studio that includes Laura Mazzeo, Sonia Williams and Raymond Wei has been working on the Infinity Principles, which are based on the five traditional Chinese elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. The Infinity Principles are an example of how HOK takes our broad knowledge of international best practices and makes it relevant in the local culture. The combination of global thought leadership and deep local knowledge brings great value to our clients while driving our design investigations deeper.

What are your favorite public spaces in Hong Kong?

Tamar Government Complex in Hong Kong

HOK did the master planning, interior design and landscape architecture for the Tamar Government Complex on a prominent site on Hong Kong’s central harbor. This is a wonderful new space anchoring a new open space system that reconnects the city with the historic Victoria Harbourfront. It stitches together the city fabric and the water’s edge. It’s great to see people taking graduation photos, having birthday parties and walking their dogs. The space is attracting an eclectic mix of people. Designers Jeff Davis in St. Louis and Barry Day in Hong Kong never could have imagined how popular a destination it would become!

I love Big Wave Bay, a small beach on the east end of Hong Kong that is a 20-minute cab ride away. We go boogie boarding there on Saturday mornings. It’s small and intimate. It reminds me of an old beach in Mexico or Greece – yet with Chinese food.

Chris and his twins on a trail overlooking Hong Kong’s Big Wave Bay

There are hundreds of miles of trails on the island of Hong Kong. We have one of the largest park systems of any metropolitan area. Preservation of this precious land is an example for all cities.

What have you learned about city planning while living in Hong Kong?

I appreciate the compactness of Hong Kong, which has 7 million people. It’s amazing how much is layered into a relatively small area. My dentist and doctor each have an office in the same building where my favorite book store is located. My family does not own a car. Everything is close and accessible through multiple modes of transportation. This is a huge lesson for city planners. I never really had a spatial understanding of the adage ‘the collapse of space and time’ until living here.

Tell me about HOK’s projects in Xiamen.

Xiamen Cross Strait Financial Center Concept Master Plan in Xiamen City

We have long-term relationships for a series of planning and architecture projects in Xiamen, which is a city not far from Hong Kong at the mouth of the Nine Dragon River. This is one of the closest major Chinese cities to Taiwan.

We have been working on large projects on Xiamen’s east coast. We are helping to establish a development strategy that allows them to take advantage of the beautiful seascape while building on the economic synergies with Taiwan.

Led by Yan Wang, we have been working there for so many years that we have developed a deep understanding of Xiamen’s people, politics, ecology and history. Each time we start a new project, we are building on knowledge amassed over many years of work. This makes HOK’s projects in Xiamen rich, layered and powerful. We work at many scales, from the overall master planning to the urban design and architecture for individual buildings.

Talk about your landscape architecture project for the Alibaba Group.

Alibaba Campus Landscape Design in Hangzhou

We designed the campus landscape in Hangzhou for the Alibaba Group, a leading Chinese Internet company. The landscape is under construction and will be finished early next year.

This has been a fascinating, rewarding project. There is a tremendous power of place in Hangzhou, which is a mystical city in China. Poets and painters have converged here for thousands of years. Our landscape plan aligns the contemporary vision and culture of Alibaba with the area’s historically significant qualities. The campus landscape functions as a place of respite and gathering.

Alibaba shares many attributes with North American Internet companies we have worked with, such as Apple, Cisco and Nortel. Our client decision-makers are young and we have had a very open process. Barry Day, Julian Wei in Shanghai and I have had the ability to communicate deeply with our client and understand Alibaba’s sensibilities. This enabled us to produce one of our best recent projects. The collaborative process shone through in the work.

Why do you enjoy collaborating with HOK’s architects on projects?

View from the ferry of the Penang Sentral Mixed-Use Transportation Hub site in Penang, Malaysia

One example is the Penang Sentral, a mixed-use transportation hub in Penang, Malaysia. It is a very dense, complicated and compact project in which the interface of infrastructure, development and public realm all happen on top of, throughout and beside the buildings. It has a ferry, commuter rail, freight train, cars, taxis and buses – all of these functional areas are linked and stacked on top each other.

The fascinating challenge has been how to interweave all this infrastructure while making intuitive flows and creating places for people and the environment. This requires contributions from a collaborative, interdisciplinary team. The design process has been driven by Jeff Kaeonil, Hong Kong’s design director, after an initial concept planning phase that my partners Riccardo Mascia and Paul Collins convinced the client to undertake in parallel to the initial station planning. Looking at a broader territory helped the design team and client understand the connective implications of the project and its capacity for transforming adjacent sites.

These complex projects are the reason planners, urban designers and landscape architects come to our firm. We want to be interacting with designers from other disciplines in real time. That is the beauty and the value of HOK. All these different disciplines can be part of the entire design process. Those synergies are powerful.

What are the visions guiding some of the world’s most progressive organizations? We can see their aspirations take physical form in the 2013 HOK Design Annual, which illustrates our design processes and products for 42 remarkable clients over 340 pages.

From three flame-shaped towers in Baku to a high-tech lab in DC, a striking new broadcasting house for the BBC in London to a bio-inspired orphanage in Port-au-Prince, the projects in this book offer a glimpse into – and optimism for – our world’s future.

Read the 2013 HOK Design Annual on Issuu or download a PDF (45 MB).

If you’re in New York City on March 19, please join us at Inscape NYC for a Workplace Salon discussing the Yahoo! No-Work-From-Home Memo. HOK will help moderate the event and participate in a debate on both sides of the argument. We’ll be joined by folks from Gensler, Credit Suisse, BrightSpot Strategy and Perkins + Will.

Workplace Salon: The Yahoo! Debate
March 19, 2013 from 8:00-9:30 a.m.
Inscape NYC Showroom
414 W. 14th Street, 6th floor
RSVP by March 15, 2013
jfeuerborn@inscapesolutions.com

The audience will be polled on which side they most agree with before and then again after the debate. Let the workplace banter begin!

Related: Why I Believe a Work-at-Home Policy Is Worth Keeping

When he was six years old, Todd Bertsch, AIA, moved with his family to Atlanta from Pocatello, Idaho. Through what he calls “serendipity,” Todd never left. He earned his architecture degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology and has spent his entire professional career in Atlanta. In 2008, he joined HOK as design director in our Atlanta office.

Todd and his wife, also an architect, live with their 11-year-old daughter in a house they designed together near Piedmont Park in Atlanta’s vibrant Virginia Highland neighborhood.

“I have seen Atlanta undergo a tremendous transformation over the past 30 years,” says Todd. “It is still young compared to Paris or New York, but Atlanta is on its way to becoming one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. We love this community.”

What do you enjoy most about being an architect?

TB: I love our clients. I get to work with scientists, educators, corporate executives — brilliant people who are changing the world. It’s exciting to share in their mission.

Practicing architecture is this incredible collision of solving technical problems, exploring philosophical ideas and expressing creativity. We have the opportunity to affect what our communities look like, how society operates and how people live. We can blend beauty and poetry to create these high-performance buildings that have a positive influence on the world. These challenges thrill me every day.

I love the energy that our young architects and designers bring. They are our daily vitamin — the Red Bull that energizes us.

How do you share in your clients’ missions?

We kick off projects with visioning sessions to uncover our their goals and aspirations, learn about what they do every day and talk about the environments they imagine for themselves.

As we design a building, we need our clients’ facility teams and the end users to keep participating in the process. We want them to be ambitious about their goals and to challenge us every day.

What is a typical day like for you?

My days are all different. But there are those special times late at night, often at the dinner table at home, when I have a pen and a roll of tracing paper in hand and a deadline in front of me. I can quietly work through all the issues and find the inspiration to inform a project. Designers live for those times.

How do you know when you find the right solution?

When I sketch, I’m relying on the proven connection between hand and brain. My hand doesn’t work on autopilot but, after 25 years, it works in a very natural way. As I’m drawing, my mind is stimulated and I begin to get a feeling about the right direction.

We know we have the right solution when we can explain a concept to a room full of clients who will occupy the building and they are as excited about it as we are. The real test comes after a building has been operating for a few years and the client is still psyched about it.

I was recently watching a young soccer player on ESPN explain that all the hard work between games that we never see is what leads to their victories on the field. Creating a great building is like that – it’s the culmination of a lot of hard work. There is no single creative burst or big idea that provides all the answers. It’s a long, challenging process that demands a commitment from every team member to resolve thousands of issues.

What were the challenges for the design of Porsche’s North American Headquarters and Customer Experience Center in Atlanta?

Porsche is a client with a distinct design signature for its products: performance expressed in an elegant, understated language. A project driven by performance and simple beauty is right up my alley!

HOK won this commission through a design competition. Porsche provided a three-page design brief and we had three weeks to design a building. We spent the first week engrossing ourselves in Porsche’s brand. We didn’t allow ourselves to think about the program or the site or begin to contemplate a design solution. We thought about what it means to be Porsche — the essence of its brand and design. We studied the history of Porsche and Ferdinand Porsche’s philosophy for designing automobiles.

Next, we spent a week brainstorming, charretting and challenging each other. To consolidate the team’s energy, we dedicated one room in our office to Porsche. People talked, sketched and referenced written material. In the end, we developed a design solution that solved the technical challenges while capturing Porsche’s poetry.

Porsche’s North American HQ and Customer Experience Center in Atlanta

Can you describe the design solution?

The architectural language is representative of the simple, yet refined and performance-driven aesthetic of Porsche.

It is an incredible brownfield site at the edge of one of the world’s busiest airports. The site is at the intersection of multiple modes of transportation: highways, trains, rail lines, buses and airplanes. It is the perfect location for Porsche’s headquarters.

Porsche has a challenging program that is seeking to create a single home for all its communities. They are bringing employees from traditional office buildings to this unique headquarters that celebrates their automobiles. There’s a training center where Porsche mechanics and technicians will learn about their automobiles. There’s a customer experience center where people will learn to really drive the cars in all conditions. Our design solution provides a single, integrated home for all these communities.

From the moment they arrive on site, the design keeps all the users connected to Porsche’s automobiles on display inside the headquarters and out on the track. The corridors have glass walls with views to the track and airport.

The performance track actually passes under the building. As the automobile moves through the track and under the building, people feel a powerful connection to Porsche’s brand.

In addition to creating a high-productivity work environment, our design addresses energy efficiency and sustainability. This includes the building’s solar orientation and giving Porsche’s people access to lots of daylight.

Tell me about the University of Florida Lake Nona Research Center.

This is a new building that opened last fall on the University of Florida’s satellite campus in Orlando. It is part of the Lake Nona Medical City, which includes the Burnham Institute and several other healthcare institutions and research organizations. The site is a confluence of organizations aspiring to improve people’s health.

The building’s unique attribute is the blend of undergraduate teaching and learning space with state-of-the-art research. We wanted the undergraduate students to see and get excited about the cool research going on inside the building. Our solution combined these activities under one roof while providing a bridge between the university and other Lake Nona research institutions.

This is a very modern building, with a design driven by ideas of energy efficiency and sustainability. To link it with the main University of Florida campus in Gainesville, which is a beautiful, traditional campus with brick as the dominant material, we introduced a high-performance, terra cotta rain screen.

University of Florida Lake Nona Research Center in Orlando

What is your project for Georgia Regents University?

We designed the new Medical Education Commons at Georgia Regents University. It is a commons building for the Colleges of Medicine, Dentistry and other departments, and it is under construction in Augusta.

The building will support new teaching pedagogies and learning strategies that complement and replace the traditional lecture format. Our design emphasizes the social nature of a commons building. It has lots of state-of-the-art classrooms and simulation labs that support experiential learning. Yet the spaces that surround and connect these classrooms are as important to the learning process.

These medical students spend long hours in the classroom. The design provides a café and lots of nice, informal and touchdown spaces where students can gather and work together.

There are 13 learning communities that act as a home away from home for 20 to 40 students. Each has a lounge area with a small kitchen, a private conference room and casual seating to support aspects of student life that aren’t about work and books.

Georgia Regents University Medical Education Commons in Augusta, Georgia

How do you create environments that help your teams design great projects?

As design leaders, it’s our job to create a safe zone where clients and team members can drop their preconceived ideas, suspend reality and contemplate the possibilities.

Bill Hellmuth, AIA, who joined HOK in 1991 and ascended to president in 2004, leads design projects worldwide. But he is especially proud of the local architectural contributions of HOK’s Washington practice, which is located in Georgetown’s historic Canal House. Under Bill’s leadership over the past two decades, the DC studio has designed more than 25 buildings across the city.

Why is contributing to Washington’s built environment so important to you?

BH: I am committed to cities. They are my focus. Washington is a high-energy city with great institutions and museums and terrifically interesting things to do. It’s a wonderful place to live.

I love being able to move through my home city and see the collection of buildings HOK has added to the landscape. Whether we are working on a master plan with the Architect of the Capitol or designing a Buddhist Culture Center, labs, office buildings, or a master plan for a train shed, the opportunity to shape places at all those scales is exciting.

Why is the master plan for Burnham Place at Washington Union Station, which just won an AIA Honor Award, so important for the city?

Over the past two decades, Washington has gone through tremendous change and developed into a full-fledged capital city. Union Station finds itself at the heart of the city’s renewal near the Capitol Building.

As the Northeast Corridor develops and high-speed rail eventually links Boston, New York and Washington, the train shed at Union Station will anchor that. Our project is part of an overall master plan that uses the air rights over the railroad yards of Union Station. It’s not unlike when New York’s Grand Central Terminal was built.

The train shed will be a landmark that demonstrates the sustainable nature of train travel. Instead of skylights, we are using a series of clerestories between two arced roofs that are at different diameters. By introducing clerestory light, we can better modulate the light coming into the train shed and improve ventilation. The undulating form allows pedestrians to see the green roofs.

Union Station
Washington, DC

The DC Consolidated Forensic Laboratory opened last fall and has already been called a “national model” for forensics science. Why?

This is an east-west oriented building, with long, glass facades facing south and north. The rest of the building is a frame of limestone.

The building houses the city morgue, a crime lab and a public health lab. Because it was bringing together various city organizations, it was important to provide space where people can collaborate.

At the eastern end of the long, southern facade, we created a 20-foot-wide edge atrium housing the conference rooms and interconnecting stairway. People passing through this active space have spontaneous opportunities to talk to each other.

As the building’s dominant street face, the rest of the south facade is made up of a series of glass louvers that track with the sun. The pitch of the louvers changes based on the sun’s location. If the temperature drops below 32 degrees, a barometric pressure gauge sets the louvers vertically so snow can’t accumulate on them. As the sun moves across the sky and the pitch of the louvers changes, the hue of the glass takes on a different character. The building is ever-changing and quite delightful.

This building educates people about its sustainable strategies. You can clearly see how the building relates to its orientation and deals with solar radiation.

Consolidated Forensic Laboratory
Washington, DC

What are your favorite parts of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s new Center for Weather and Climate Prediction, which recently opened in College Park, Maryland?

First, I like that this had to be a very cost-effective project for us to win the design competition — and that it is LEED Gold.

We started with a simple strategy for bringing sunlight into the space. Sunshades and light shelves become the architecture of the long, curving south facade. The long north facade looks into the woods. We created a super-efficient, 80,000-square-foot floor plate arranged around a triangular atrium. By optimizing the building form and floor plate, we were able to do some fun, sculptural things within the budget.

Buildings that say something about their occupants always intrigue me. We wanted this building to communicate the motion of waves, which is studied by NOAA’s scientists.

All the roofs are vegetated except for the sloping roof. When it rains, water moves down that sloping roof, onto 18 stainless steel wires and into a French drain. During rainstorms, the building becomes active as the rainwater feeds a beautiful waterfall that charges the bioretention swales and that is visible from the atrium. This feature relates to NOAA’s mission, is efficient and sustainable, and is visually interesting.

NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction
College Park, Maryland

What is the next frontier for sustainable design?

Our approach to sustainability has become less poetic and more scientific. We’re focusing on how sustainability interacts with building sciences. Based on our commitment to buildingSMART and BIM, we have the ability to establish and achieve measurable sustainability goals. With this approach, we’re making a bigger impact.

Tell me about the sustainable goals for your Msheireb Heart of Doha project in Qatar.

Our client has a wonderful goal of creating a sustainable, Washington-scaled city where the 14 buildings we’re designing are between six and 15 stories high. We need to design an urban fabric that is indigenous to the area. Most of the building materials are solid and only 20 to 35 percent of the building openings are glass. It is a human-scaled, welcoming development that will be connected to Doha’s new subway system.

Msheireb Heart of Doha
Doha, Qatar

What do you enjoy most about working in the Middle East?

Our clients in the Middle East have a wonderful, infectious energy and a commitment to building their cities.

We designed a 74-story building under construction in Abu Dhabi as the headquarters for the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company – ADNOC. Though it is very tall and will be a new UAE landmark, the building has a simple form. It creates a sense of dignity by being quiet, strong, and improbably thin and elegant. There is a lesson in that.

ADNOC Headquarters
Abu Dhabi, UAE

What is the lesson?

That nothing is timeless but great buildings can remain relevant over a long period of time. A great building has a certain integrity in its architectural moves and devices. Its design is rooted in meaning, not fashion. Great architecture is inspiring and uplifting. It contributes to the culture, society and fabric of its place.

Who is an architect you admire?

Eero Saarinen has inspired me. Saarinen’s buildings are based on strong ideas and never fashionable. The Dulles Terminal was about the freedom of flight. That idea is expressed in the freedom of the span creating the terminal’s great hall. There is a lot to learn about beauty, simplicity, strength and attention to proportions in this building. It stands the test of time.

What advice would you give young architects?

There are lots of talented architects. Young designers should understand that the formula for success includes a combination of design talent, communication skills, the ability to apply building sciences, a willingness to follow your passion and a lot of really hard work.

What unites HOK’s people around the world?

When you are in a room of HOKers, everyone genuinely wants you to succeed. Is this part of our DNA, maybe passed down from the Midwestern values of our founders? I don’t know but it is powerful.

Do you have other creative outlets?

I do a fair amount of painting. Each time I start a new painting, I think of an exhibit in which I saw 30 paintings from the last 30 days of Van Gogh’s life. I am plodding along thinking, “That guy did a painting a day — each one of which was a masterpiece — what the heck am I doing?” But painting is a great outlet.

“Yellow Sky”
By Bill Hellmuth

When you visit your doctor to talk about what is hurting or not right, you may find yourself describing sharp pains, headaches or numbness. If your doctor is doing her job, she will then ask you follow-up questions about these symptoms to get to the root of the problem.

You are probably painfully aware of some symptoms. Others are less obvious and take some probing and testing to figure out. Having studied for many years and seen many patients, your doctor should be able to give you a reasonably accurate diagnosis of what is ailing you.

That’s our job, but for space. At HOK, we listen to our clients and evaluate their complaints. But we also know enough about human behavior and how people are affected by space to unearth and diagnose issues that can be solved by the workplace. Though complaints like, “my neck hurts” or “I can’t concentrate” or “I sneeze at the office” may be problems that a doctor should address, space may also be part of the problem.

After several decades of practice, we have observed millions of square feet of space being used across hundreds of industries in every building type. We have talked to thousands of people about how space is supporting or not supporting how they work. We have worked with smart researchers at universities and institutions across the globe who have taught us about how space can boost human performance and also improve human health and wellness. The top ten strategies are:

1. Thermal Comfort and Temperature
2. Access to Nature, Views and Daylight
3. Sensory change and Variability
4. Color
5. Noise Control
6. Crowding
7. Human Factors and Ergonomics
8. Indoor Air Quality
9. Choice
10. Employee Engagement

How can these strategies improve performance and health in your workplace? Click here to learn more and see real-life examples of these strategies at work.

With the ceremonial guard at Gyeongbokgung Palace in northern Seoul

The incredible cast of HOK people working on this project includes Ken Drucker (NY), Josh Schroeder (Hong Kong), James Mallory (NY), Phillip Luse (NY), Seung Lee (NY), Neil McClelland (NY) and Claire Whitehill (NY). I would be remiss to forget our fearless “programming document translators” out of DC: Sunhwa Son and Jeong Hwa Jo.

Thanks to this project, we learned that HOK has 14 fluent Korean speakers, mostly in New York and Washington, DC, but also in Los Angeles and Chicago. HOK also has employees, not all of them sitting in Asia, who are fluent in several Asian languages. This includes speakers of Chinese (41), Japanese (14), Malaysian (4), Tagalog–Philippines (5), Taiwanese (1), Vietnamese (1) and Bahasa–Indonesia (2).

During this last trip, Ken Drucker and I ran into Larry Malcic (London) and Chris Yoon (London) pitching on a project for a different company. Yes, it is a small, small world.

Culture Shocks

While in Seoul, I have experienced many culture shocks:

• I was the only blonde for miles yet never felt uncomfortable or like I stood out.
• The streets are spotless in Seoul, yet this is a city of 10 million people. I can tell you that New York City, which is roughly 8 million people, is significantly less pristine.
• People on the streets are very well-dressed and well-spoken. They have a great fashion sense and few are overweight.
• Women are a minority when it comes to senior positions in many organizations. Yet Korea is about to elect its first female president.
• Though the sense of hierarchy is strong, collaboration and agreement of the whole is essential for decision making.
• Handshakes involve one hand on an elbow and the other hand shaking to be more “honorable.” Bowing has many forms for different situations: slight bow, 45-degree angle bow, nodding bow, etc. This takes practice to get right. I still look clumsy trying.
• We didn’t see a lot of bikes but public transportation is good.
• Most of the street signage was in Korean and English. Stores were very international. In some areas, from the outside we could have been in New York City … OK, maybe Koreatown.
• Gangnam is an actual district where people actually dance Gangnam style.
• Being a pescatarian is not normal. People looked at me like I had two heads when I tried to explain that I eat only fish and vegetables. There are few Korean dishes that don’t involve pork, chicken or beef. I would have been in trouble if I didn’t eat fish.
• Coffee shops – and not just Starbucks – are EVERYWHERE. We learned from Chris Yoon that coffee shops are considered a “draw” for buildings and coffee shop owners are given a break on rent. I suppose the logic is that once you’re in a building for coffee, you’re more likely to buy earmuffs, chocolate or a chair.
• A Korean massage is not relaxing.

Jogyesa Buddhist Temple in Seoul

The Korean Workplace

Working on this project for Samchully has taught me about how people work in Korea. I’m probably biased by our excellent client, but here’s what I have learned so far:

• The chairman makes all the decisions. There is a clear leader, though he takes advice from many people.
• Impromptu space is not necessary – it was value engineered out on day one! Collaboration occurs more formally and in conference rooms.
• Work at home is not officially supported. Mobile work is supported and the technology is excellent. Yet because people are often working in groups, the office is the most convenient place to be. Also, being in front of the boss is important. If you’re away from the office, you’re probably on a trip with your boss.
• Employees wear uniforms. There is a summer and a winter uniform, keeping the answer of “what to wear to work” pretty simple. Many companies also have a song. One of our clients sang Samchully’s song for us. It sounded like a university fight song.
• Open offices, even for senior-level people, are acceptable. Bench seating for staff is typical. I saw lots of people in open offices – more than we typically see in a US office, where people are more mobile. That said, you could hear a pin drop. There weren’t any loudmouths using a speaker phone. People were super-considerate.
• Food is central in business and personal life. Sharing meals with people is critical for negotiating and for building trust. As the locations of many impromptu meetings, the cafeteria and café spaces are particularly important.
• Conference spaces are bigger than those in the US or Europe because the average size of meetings is larger.
• When meeting a client, it’s important to allow for time for the “after meeting.” This is when additional negotiations and important bonding happen. I realized that our typical conferencing ratios did not apply!

If asked to name the single most impressive thing about my visits to Korea, I would say the extreme hospitality of the people. We were respected for what we do and treated like royalty. Who could ask for more?

Gyeongbokgung Palace in northern Seoul

Like a proud father, Kenneth Drucker, FAIA, notes that two of his New York team’s projects that began more than half a decade ago have opened in recent months: Harlem Hospital’s new Mural Pavilion and a replacement hospital for the University Medical Center at Princeton.

While keeping an eye on all of the projects coming out of HOK’s New York studio, Ken is also designing a headquarters for Korean energy company Samchully in Seoul and the Singapore Chancery infill building in Manhattan. He recently began design of a new ambulatory care center for New York-Presbyterian Hospital on a prominent Upper East Side site. Finally, he just returned from giving a presentation on the integration of academic buildings into campus and urban neighborhoods in Toronto and another presentation on tall buildings and biomimicry in Shanghai. Now in his 14th year as HOK’s design director in New York, Ken clearly is hitting his stride.

Tell me about the projects you have been working on.

KD: We won a design commission for the new pavilion at Harlem Hospital after several firms were asked to incorporate prominent WPA-era murals into the design. Our client asked us to prominently display the original WPA murals created by African American artists during the 1930s. These had never previously been placed on public display. To celebrate this artwork and life in Harlem, we used digital technology to turn the murals into the building’s primary façade directly facing Lenox Avenue. The mural by Vertis Hayes, “In Pursuit of Happiness,” speaks to the diaspora of African Americans in Harlem and connects the hospital to its community. It is a privilege to develop iconic civic architecture in such a historically significant community.

Harlem Hospital Mural Pavilion
New York, New York

We had the opportunity to design a new hospital for the University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro on a 150-acre campus. The building’s gentle arc embraces the southern exposure and the beautiful views while bringing in daylight. Blending hospitality and healthcare, the public concourse invites people in and features views to the park and a clear wayfinding system. The horizontal and vertical organization is very strong.

University Medical Center of Princeton
Plainsboro, New Jersey

The Singapore Chancery is under construction here in New York. Our challenge was to create an iconic yet secure building at a townhouse scale. Five twisted glass blades in the main facade of the building represent the five attributes of the Singaporean government. A slot atrium separates the programmed spaces from the core spaces while drawing in daylight from the south.

Singapore Chancery
New York, New York

Last spring, we won a competition to design the new University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences. We are beginning schematic design for this $375 million, 540,000-square-foot academic medical campus. This building will help revitalize downtown Buffalo and become a new iconic landmark for the city, which is a living museum of buildings designed by Wright, Kahn, Saarinen, Richardson, Sullivan and landscapes by Olmsted. The design is creating a memorable heart and soul for the medical school and a gateway to a future downtown campus for the University at Buffalo while responding to the context of the adjacent historic district of Allentown. The building will be constructed on top of an existing NFTA subway system and connect to other new buildings that will make up the new Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus. The project has aspirations for LEED Gold.

University at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences
Buffalo, New York

For the past three years, we have been master planning for New York-Presbyterian Hospital‘s downtown and uptown campuses. Now we are designing a nine-story, 540,000-square-foot ambulatory care center on the downtown campus at York Avenue and 68th Street. This building will become the hospital’s new front door and civic identity. We want it to relieve some of the pressure patients feel when they come to a healthcare setting on an urban site. The team is looking at daylighting and façade treatments that protect occupants while giving them views to the city and to the original historic campus on the East River.

Internationally, we are just completing the design development phase for a 200,000-square-foot headquarters building for Samchully, the Con Edison of Seoul. The site is a stone’s throw from the National Assembly on Yeouido Island. The design creates a series of four stacked boxes, three of which are cantilevered over the initial box and a “fifth” box defined by a civic-scaled trellis. The facades are sawtoothed in plan while the orientation of the sawtooth changes on each box. The overall impression is that of a stone building when looking at the building obliquely. Yet it gives the building the perception of being taller than it is — 380 feet — by accentuating the verticality of the sawtooth.

Samchully Headquarters
Seoul, South Korea

Why do you enjoy working on international projects?

Our New York studio has designed more than seven million square feet in Korea over the past five years. In addition to Korea, I have worked in China, India, Vietnam and Brazil. I love these projects, and so do my team members, because our clients allow us to incubate and test ideas about building materials and systems. We get to design everything from public spaces to tall buildings and we get to see the projects built in an amazingly fast timeframe.

It is important not to impose our Western values on international projects. We integrate the design into the local context and environment and look for ways for architecture to express each culture and that culture’s relationship to nature. Our international clients have a unique respect for HOK’s ideas and want our knowledge. That’s a rewarding feeling.

New Songdo City Blocks D22 (left) and D23 (right)
Incheon, South Korea

Take me through your design process.

Design should always be a highly collaborative process. The New York design studio is filled with an ensemble of exceptionally talented people, both on the technical and design side. We strive to produce a balance between the art and science of architecture. We encourage design conversations and collaboration with even the youngest designers. I want ideas to be generated from the entire team and try to guide, mentor and nurture our up-and-coming designers.

The design process is one of analysis, discovery, optimization, composition, placemaking and programmatic analysis before refining concepts to engage both the context and environment. We never begin the design process with a preconceived solution to the problem we are being asked to solve.

What is great architecture?

Great architecture responds to the client’s needs, the environment and its context. Great architecture pleases people. It uplifts the human spirit.

New Songdo City Sheraton Incheon Hotel
Incheon, South Korea

What inspires you?

Nature and its simplicity inspire me. Biology and the relationship between the natural and built world inspire me. The people I meet and work with inspire me. I try to lead and inspire them, too.

The underlying theme is that I want to improve the human condition and leave the world for my kids in a better place than it was left for me. The impact of global warming, as seen recently with Hurricane Sandy, deeply concerns me. I choose to live in New York City because I believe it is one of the most sustainable places to live in the US.

What is the next frontier for sustainable design?

The next frontier is net zero energy, net zero carbon emissions and beyond to net positive design, as well as biomimetic design.

We designed a project in Brazil that was inspired by biomimicry and the rainforest. Using biology for inspiration doesn’t mean that the building will function like a biological organism, but it allowed us to design a site-specific building that emulates the performance of the natural environment. I had romantic visions of the Amazon rainforest prior to my trip to Brazil and was saddened to see the impact of Sao Paolo’s 21 million residents on their indigenous habitat. We wanted our project to provide hope and reintroduce life’s principles to revitalize the building’s neighborhood and contribute to Sao Paolo.

Commercial Center
Sao Paolo, Brazil

What are your favorite places in New York City?

I like the interaction of the city with its parks and the water. Across the street from our office, Bryant Park is a harmonizing civic space filled with a variety of activity. It’s occupied almost 24 hours a day. Central Park is one of my favorite places. I live between Riverside Park and Central Park and appreciate the juxtaposition of the edges of these parks, the street walls and the parks themselves. The open spaces of the city are where we also get show off the great diversity of the city. I love the water’s edge around New York City and the reclamation of that edge from industrial to recreational uses.

We live near the Museum of Natural History, which has been an important place for us in terms of raising children in New York. We spend a lot of time in New York’s museums.

Is it difficult to raise children in the city?

It’s actually very easy. One reason my wife and I wanted to move here from Los Angeles in 1998 is that we were tired of the commuting and segregated life of Los Angeles.

New York has everything that any child would be interested in. Our kids are now 10, 16 and 20. My oldest son, who is studying to be an ornithologist, learned how to be a bird specialist in Central Park since the age of seven and volunteers in the bird specimen lab at the Museum of Natural History. My other son rows for an urban crew team on the East River and is studying Mandarin. My 10-year-old daughter is active in piano and swimming and can walk to school and all of her after-school activities. By growing up in New York, they are learning to communicate in a multicultural society and how to be global citizens in a diverse community.

Central Park, New York City
Image courtesy Flickr user Gane

What do you do when you aren’t working?

I swim when I am in the city and bike when I am in the country.

I designed a passive solar house on 12 acres in the Berkshires in Massachusetts, about 100 miles north of New York City. It is a south-facing glass barn with 37 operable windows that allow me to tune the building based on the four seasons. The house is a composition of four sloped roofs organized around the hearth and is nested in an area of rolling hills adjacent to hundreds of acres protected by the Massachusetts Trustees of Reservations. The design saves 60 percent of energy costs during the year.

The house gives us a perfect balance of living an urban existence during the week and in relative isolation on weekends. It has the Internet but no TV. We listen to NPR, work in the garden, cook, and reconnect as a family after our hectic week in the city.

Are you involved in any community organizations?

I am on the board of openhousenewyork, which introduces the architecture of New York City to citizens. I am active with the Municipal Art Society, the Forum for Urban Design, the Architectural League the AIA New York and New York New Visions, which contributed to the plan for rebuilding Lower Manhattan after 9/11. I am hoping I will get involved in the rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. I also am involved with my children’s schools and am a class parent in my daughter’s fifth-grade class.

How did you decide to be an architect?

As a college freshman, I was pursuing a pre-med degree and working at a cancer research center. I was in a sculpture class as an elective with freshman architecture students and was introduced to architecture as a profession for the first time and was hooked. It was good that I did, because I was the one who fainted in biology class when we were asked to draw our own blood. I didn’t have the stomach for it.

Thirty-four-year architectural veteran Russ Drinker, AIA, LEED AP BD+C, joined the leadership team in HOK’s San Francisco office on Sept 4. as a new senior vice president and management principal.

As a pre-teen growing up in a 150-year-old Victorian farmhouse surrounded by an apple orchard in Saratoga, California, Russ built tree houses and forts. By the time he began studying architecture at the University of California in Berkeley in 1976, he had graduated to designing and constructing 2,000-square-foot solar homes.

“I had no business doing this, but I designed and built a custom house while an undergraduate at Berkeley,” said Russ. “It taught me about designing buildings from the inside-out and about sustainability. And I really enjoyed the client relationship.”

In search of a new experience, Russ took his undergraduate degree and headed east to New York City. Over the next 10 years, he worked for two firms while earning his Master of Architecture degree from Columbia University in 1986. He also ran his own firm, designing high-end residential and commercial projects. During this decade in New York, Russ had the opportunity to study with Steven Holl and work with architects including Thom Mayne, David Rockwell and Paul Rudolph.

“Working in an urban setting, managing lots of projects, absorbing how these world class architects ran their practices and worked in the studio, and studying history and theory at Columbia enriched my orientation to the design profession,” he said. “It was all quite distinct from anything I had experienced on the West Coast. But it also gave me a comprehensive grasp of project design and delivery.”

While in New York City, Russ also married Deb Holdeman, whom he had met while at UC Berkeley and was then working on her masters at Yale. They married in 1988 and in 1990 decided to move back to the West Coast to be closer to their families. Russ also wanted to have the opportunity to work on more new buildings.

Back in the Bay Area, Russ continued to enjoy design but found himself gravitating toward operations while in leadership roles at a series of mid-sized firms. “I was fascinated by what it took to run a successful architectural practice,” he said.

In 1997, Drinker joined MBT Architecture in San Francisco. Less than a year later, he was elevated to director of operations. Within three years, he was named CEO. In 2010, the MBT board agreed to have their 75-person firm be acquired by Perkins+Will, with Russ becoming managing director of the San Francisco office and then regional director of its practice in Southeast Asia. His experience there included research and academic projects on six University of California campuses and several at Stanford University. He also led a Green Mark Platinum project for the National Research Foundation in Singapore and a new 32-million-sq.-ft. campus for Princess Noura University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Russ joins HOK in San Francisco management committee members Paul Woolford, Lynn Filar and Rob Tibbetts in leading HOK’s offices in San Francisco and Seattle. He brings to HOK a reputation for leading large-scale, challenging, sustainable projects through innovative project delivery methods and a history of acting as an agent for strategic change.

What are the challenges facing architecture firms today?

Our clients are stressed by many issues related to globalization, the economy and technology. Their needs are changing rapidly. We need to help them look over the horizon to see what they want to be in the future and then create environments that will help them get there.

The ultimate measure of our success is whether we give clients what they need to thrive. I believe we need to provide design excellence, thought leadership, technical innovation and a great delivery experience. If we can act as their trusted advisors, and not just architects, clients will come back to us.

How is project delivery changing?

The rulebook for designing and delivering projects has been thrown away. From design-build to P3, every method is being looked at and new hybrids invented for every project. This experimentation with delivery methods is a huge challenge for design professionals and our clients.

Design is a team effort. I don’t think you can achieve excellent design or technological expertise or innovation without strong management. Design firms need to position themselves to lead projects in every kind of delivery method and then be fast and decisive. We can and should be leading these projects holistically.

You were named one of the “101 Leaders in Sustainable City Making and Theory” by Professor Steffen Lehmann in The Principles of Green Urbanism. What are the next frontiers for sustainability?

Technology that enables sustainable solutions is improving. The regulatory environment is changing to favor sustainability. Client support for sustainability is increasing because it can be achieved economically. All this means that building incredibly sustainable projects at market rates is no longer a pipe dream.

There has been a rapid pivot to looking beyond LEED to designing buildings that are net zero in terms of energy, carbon emissions, waste and water use. We want to look past that to creating climate-positive projects.

The technical nature of highly sustainable projects means we need to include great engineers as part of the team from the beginning. HOK’s in-house engineers are critical to our ability to designing integrated, sustainable building systems.

I am interested in restorative projects that go beyond individual buildings to impact entire communities. I have spent time in developing cities across Asia, the Middle East, the Americas and Africa that are stressed in every possible way. We need to be leaders in working with clients and local governments on long-term sustainable planning, which would preserve natural resources and environmental quality but, just as importantly, protect the local cultures. The more we can look at all the interrelationships of the large-scale systems, the more effective we can be at the building level. There is a huge opportunity to move away from the idea of individual high performance buildings to looking at the entire social and economic community.

What do you like to do when you are not working?

Whether it is drawing, building, literature or music, I have always been pulled to creative endeavors.

I have played bass guitar since the fifth grade. As a kid, I played in some bands and thought maybe I could make a living in rock and roll until I considered that I was not an extraordinarily gifted musician! But I still enjoy playing and collecting all types of instruments. I have basses, marimbas, steel drums and collect musical instruments from all over the world.

Family is important to me. My wife and I have an 18-year-old daughter and we live in Oakland in a 100-year-old home that we restored. We live in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland, which is a model of mixed-use urban development and walkability. We can walk to shopping, restaurants and the BART station.

I like to travel. I enjoy the cultural traditions, history and people of Asia. I also participate in all types of sports – activities like snow or water skiing, mountain biking or kite boarding at Lake Tahoe.