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 …
For the third year in a row, the Design Futures Council and DesignIntelligence have ranked HOK as the most-admired firm in the world for its leadership in sustainable and high-performance design. This is indeed an honor and a privilege.
“HOK is a firm often cited for making a difference. … HOK is recognized for breaking new ground with clear, practical and inspirational leadership. HOK staff is admired for its compelling case studies, engaging thought leadership, and insights that lead to making wise decisions to benefit the planet’s future condition.”
James Cramer
Co-Chair, Design Futures Council
Founding Editor, DesignIntelligence
We owe much of our leadership status to our clients. It is our clients who bring their vision …
The world of sustainable design has truly gone global. I spent part of last week teaching at the University of the Donau in their International Master’s Program for Sustainable Building Design. The program is taught in English and attracts people from all over the world. Students spend a week in Austria, then return home for 3-4 weeks and then return for another intense week. There were no two people from the same country in the program this week. The class included architects and engineers from Russia, Denmark, Germany, Canada, Saudi Arabia, Australia and Spain among other locations. The diversity of homelands of the class brought a wonderful diversity …
Posted on behalf of Bill Odell, director of HOK’s Science + Technology group and sustainable design pioneer.
A week ago, I ran the London Marathon. I was running as part of the Cancer Research UK team, one of the partners in the UKCMRI research center we are designing in central London.
It was a terrific day to run and perhaps the best race I have ever been involved in. For the runners out there, I highly recommend it. The route starts in Greenwich, winds through the Docklands before heading into London, past the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey before ending in front of …
Mary Ann Lazarus snapped this shot on her iPhone at the AIA’s National Convention in Miami last week. Pictured are Bill Odell (HOK St. Louis), Colin Rohlfing (HOK Chicago) and Wyatt Frantom (HOK Houston) who, on behalf of the hundreds of HOKers who worked on this amazing project, accepted the AIA Committee on the Environment’s “Top 10 Green Projects” award for the design of the LEED Platinum-certified King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. Here’s the KAUST case study on the AIA’s site.
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Penny Malina to the rescue… at least that is how I feel about Penny. She saves me from my “frienemy”, the computer (or technology in general), on a daily basis. Penny is an integral part of HOK’s IT Force… and the road that led here there is certainly an unconventional one. Her previous life / experience gives her the perfect balance and personality to not just understand computers, but the people who can’t quite figure out how to use them. (And, did I mention she is a major contributor to the success of HOK’s Diversity Task Force???)
Penny’s giving spirit, positive attitude, and solution-driven thinking make this VP one of my favorite …
Early in 2007, architect (and Life at HOK blogger) Colin Rohlfing, sustainable design director in HOK’s Chicago office, accepted a challenge from long-time HOK St. Louis sustainable design principal Bill Odell.
Odell, one of the lead designers on HOK’s King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) team, asked Rohlfing to organize the sustainable design effort and to manage the LEED coordination and documentation for the 6.5-million-square-foot KAUST campus and town center projects—arguably the most ambitious delivery effort in the firm’s 54-year history (it was designed and built in just three years).
Two-and-a-half years and a lifetime of experiences later, Rohlfing, 28, recently learned that the team’s hard work on KAUST had …
“Right now is a great time to be entering the design profession because we are going through another revolution,” says HOK Sustainable Design Director Mary Ann Lazarus, AIA. ”We need to include young voices in the mix…we need to have our assumptions challenged.”
Greening a building is hard. Greening an entire organization is even harder. At last count, HOK had more than 900 LEED accredited professionals and 39 LEED certified projects (with 150+ pending). Those results don’t come from spreading magical green pixie dust across the firm. They come from blood, sweat, tears and an unwavering commitment to sustainable design. One of HOK’s earliest and hardest-working green pioneers has been Mary Ann Lazarus, who literally, along with Bill Odell and Sandra Mendler, wrote the book …
Architect Bill Odell, director of HOK’s Science + Technology group, talks about the ideal lab for science and the lab of the future.
Something most HOK people don’t know about Bill: In addition to knowing everything there is to know about laboratory design and being a driving force behind HOK’s design for KAUST, he has run a few marathons and in November 2007 talked to Lance Armstrong outside a porta potty in the Staten Island staging area at the start of the New York City Marathon. “He’s a big guy,” Bill told me. “Nice guy.”
One day in the late-1990s I found myself in a car driving through Belgium with Bill and a few other HOKers. We had …
