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?”

Congratulations to architect Sarah Dirsa for being named to BD+C’s 40 Under 40 list!

Sarah, HOK’s social responsibility chair and founding director of HOK IMPACT, is passionate about public interest design. Some of her recent pro bono work includes Project Haiti Orphanage & Children’s Center and Potentials Resale Boutique. She was also instrumental in bringing the Next American City Vanguard Conference to St. Louis in 2012.

Click here to read more about Sarah and her fellow 40 Under 40 awardees from BD+C.

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.

“Justin is a rare individual whose combination of deep technical knowledge and a sensitive eye uniquely position him as a special professional. His leadership brings visions to reality; his dedication improves the public realm.” – Paul Woolford, Design Principal, HOK in San Francisco

A licensed architect, Justin has been with HOK for five years. In both his personal and professional activities, Justin is motivated by engagement with the physical world. A love of materials and making things drove him to become a successful engineer, and further to have a hand in the creation of the built environment. Now an architect, he applies the mandate of “actionable, scalable and sustainable” to his many design efforts. He directs his skills to projects that improve the public realm and is stubborn about ensuring that they succeed.

5 Facts About Justin

1. Prior to his devotion to architecture, Justin was a design engineer in Silicon Valley, earning two patents for his innovative work.
2. In 1993 he took a three month, solo motorcycle trip through the American Southwest.
3. He has a young daughter and considers fatherhood his greatest achievement.
4. He is quite the athlete. Justin won second place in his age group for the Napa Triathlon in 2008 and third place in his age group for the Big Sur Trail Marathon in 2012, a brutal marathon that includes more than one vertical mile of climbing and descent. Additionally, he participated in the Swim from Alcatraz for the first time in 2009, a mile-and-a-half swim through the cold San Francisco Bay. He has since swam the event two more times.
5. He is an accomplished photographer, having used a camera as a tool to observe the world since he was 17.

reNews program

One of the numerous achievements on which Justin’s award is based is the re:NEWS program.

The blighted Mid-Market District of San Francisco has the highest crime rates in the city and is notorious for low occupancy rates for businesses. Many previous efforts have tried to address this anomaly in an otherwise vibrant and progressive city, but none have succeeded.

In 2010, HOK, led by Justin, spearheaded an eight-week, pro-bono community based charrette to envision actionable, sustainable, scalable and realistic solutions to this urban-scale challenge. This effort drew together residents, business leaders, designers, and engineers, most notably the Central Market Community Benefit District (CMCBD), Public Architecture and WSP Flack + Kurtz, culminating in a simple adaptive reuse solution: converting disused newspaper kiosks along the arterial Market Street into community-centered hubs for free services and opportunity for small businesses.

The design team proposed several uses for these unused kiosks to cultivate local business, inspire more pedestrian traffic and provide a platform to showcase the unique culture that exists in the Mid-Market neighborhood. In 2011, after one year of effort, the first kiosk was activated – free bicycle repair at the 7th and Market kiosk (courtesy of a neighborhood bicycle store). An artist-in-residence kiosk is now also open and other uses are in the planning stage.

“Architects too often look only to newly constructed interventions to solve problems. The elegance of this project and approach is that the solution artfully exploits the resources that already exist. This illustrates the most profound level of service that architects can offer their client and community.” – John Peterson, AIA, Founder and President, Public Architecture

Recognition for re:NEWS

• AIA San Francisco Chapter, “Special Achievement Award”, re:NEWS, 2012
• Venice Biennale “Spontaneous Interventions” U.S. Exhibit, re:NEWS, 2012
• Two articles in the San Francisco Chronicle
• Three speaking engagements: Public Architecture, Lambda Alpha – the Land Economics Society, and Meet and Match – The Open Hand Studio

Members of HOK Chicago and the ACE students they mentored stand for a photo at the 2013 ACE Final Presentation ceremony held at the UIC Forum, an HOK project.

For 20 weeks this past winter, HOK’s Chicago office was proud to host local high school students from all over the city as part of the Architecture, Construction and Engineering (ACE) Mentor Program, an integral community program that inspires students to pursue careers in design and construction. Beginning last October, HOK mentors, in partnership with Halvorson, Lend Lease and GSA, worked with students once a week for two hours to develop an original design project. The students presented their concept to peers and esteemed members of the community at a special awards ceremony at the UIC Forum (an HOK designed building) earlier this month.

The two towers of the "Link to the Lake" concept are presented by an student above.

Through a series of design charrettes, the students came up with a “Link to The Lake” concept of two towers connected by a shared link bridging between the buildings. Located on a partially developed land site immediately west of DuSable Park, the project included a redevelopment of the park to encourage use of green space.  A shorter tower containing condominiums was positioned to the south, near the river and accessed from the adjacent neighborhood through Water Street. A taller tower contained both condos and hotels with an entry lobby for residents at Water Street, and a hotel lobby and entry plaza connected to Lower Lake Shore Drive on the east. As an architectural expression, the students came up with ideas of how the two forms would interact resulting in the building’s sweeping curves as if they are leaning toward each other. A ‘diagrid’ was employed as both an aesthetic and functional solution to the building’s structure.

Students discuss the inspiration and details for their original design.

The students also curated interior finishes that catered to the specific needs of each level based on space types. The spa and pool finishes featured a palette of cool colors and a fresh aesthetic, while the dining room emphasized a warmer pallet with bolder patterns. Overall, the students’ project concept was well received and showcased a promising level of design intuition. Three students on the HOK team received internships and one student received a design-build scholarship at the event.

A student explains the interior finishes palette and aesthetics for "Link to the Lake."

HOK is proud to participate in the ACE program, which offers valuable training and guidance to students in a real-world setting. Since the program’s inception in 1994 it has evolved into the industry’s fastest-growing high school mentoring program, reaching over 8,000 students annually. The program also financially supports the student’s continued growth through scholarships and grants and has awarded over $12 million dollars in scholarships since its commencement.

Special thanks to BickVanh Cam, Dominick Gallegos, Tam Fisher and Chansik Park, who continuously dedicated their time every week to coaching students and facilitating their educational advancement.

We’re going to find out….. I am immensely honored to be selected by the AIA President as a member of the newly formed Sustainability and Health Advisory Committee. The committee consists of some amazing talent from around the sustainable industry. These individuals have all been my mentors and inspiration for the past 8 years and I am looking forward to the opportunity to work with them on the future of sustainable education and training at the AIA. Although sustainability is becoming more and more of a mainstream design process, as an industry, we are not achieving our goals and we have A LOT of work to do.

* image by By William J. Worthen, AIA, Director Resource Architect for Sustainability 

http://www.aia.org/practicing/AIAB088654

Several of HOK Chicago’s interior designers and architects recently attended the 4^th Annual Chicago Multifamily Summit, hosted by Bisnow. To kick off the events covering the future of residential development, HOK Chicago’s David Genc, a Senior Designer and Residential thought leader, delivered the opening remarks to more than 450 of the foremost real estate owners, developers, and financiers from Chicago and abroad.

David delivered a message on how residential design will have to adapt to an ever-changing and increasingly diverse demographic while building upon and enhancing a sense of community. David was fresh off a trip to India, where he and a team of HOK designers are developing new and innovative paradigms for a 33 acre mixed-used development in Mumbai that includes upwards of 1800 residential units. By combining a Western sense of urbanism and place-making with an Indian demand for natural light and ventilation, the HOK team has worked through multiple design iterations to reveal a new residential design model for India. This new development is centered around a temple and school, bringing back city planning principles that have been around for centuries. Designed to create an affordable and efficient community for families in an urban environment, this is a model that Chicago and other cities can emulate to mitigate the flow of families to the suburbs.

Following the opening remarks, a group of noteworthy panelists examined the future of real estate finance and development, and several of David’s points were reinforced in the discussions that followed. Some of those points were addressed explicitly, and others more implicitly. A recurring theme was the old adage, ‘location, location, location.’ In the real estate market a lot of data and analysis goes into determining the ‘location’ for development, but equally important are a sense of place, community, identity and affordability. Some of the best and most innovative work often occurs at the nexus between the quantitative and the qualitative. More than just building to meet demand, it takes a certain level of design rigor to create something enduring that becomes part of an increasingly fruitful ‘location, location, location’ as each design does its part to develop a better place.

Another successful HOK Structure’s Pi day has come and nearly gone as I write this.  As always it was an enjoyable event for all; we brought pie, we ate pie, we recited pi.    This was the St. Louis Structural Engineering group’s sixth annual event to celebrate the mathematical constant pi, an irrational and transcendental number represented by the Greek letter “π”.

To celebrate, we hosted an event inviting colleagues in our office to bring in a pie and participate in a “Best In Show” pie contest (and of course to eat pie) in addition to hosting the “most recited digits of pi” contest.  Winners were awarded with $30 gift cards to Pi Pizzeria!

Without further ado (because most of you want to skip the math lecture and find out who won the contests)…

Best In Show Pie: Michael Vande Velde’s Homemade Cherry Pie (see below)

Most Recited Digits of Pi: Nag Nagulapati with 51 digits including the first 3

An additional thanks goes to Cheryl Steffe, Michael Vande Velde, Justin Thomas, Paul Wilhelms, Mike Hyland, Steven Crang, Kirsten Marklin, and Nag Nagulapati.

Pi Day of Years Past:

Happy Belated Pi Day – 2012
Fourth Annual Pi Day - 2011
3.15 Pi Day Round Up - 2010
Happy Pi(e) Day – 2009
First Annual Structure’s Pi Day was in 2008 and went quietly into the night.

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.

Accenture this week released the results of a study that highlights what makes women happy (in the workplace, at least), just in time for International Women’s Day 2013, which happens to be this Friday, March 8. The study concluded that women are more interested in flexibility than in money and that work-life balance (we’ll have to save trying to define what that means for another time) is the number one quality women find in the workplace.

The report goes on to say that, for most women, happiness in the workforce is measured by flexibility, workplace relationships, and job stability.  The top ways that women define personal success?  Having a family and happiness.

The question, dear reader, is what do you think about this?  Why is flexibility so important to women?  We see more and more women continue to achieve professional success and, at the same time, we also see that work-life balance is extremely important.  Are these two goals in conflict with each other, or do they go hand-in-hand?  What does “having it all” – i.e. professional success and a personal life – look like?

Read the Accenture report here.

Another interesting read about “having it all” on PandoDaily and how it looks different for different people.