About the same time the United Nations Climate Change Conference was taking place in Copenhagen in December, Stan Wrzeski, LEED AP, joined HOK’s Sustainability Consulting group as director of carbon and climate action. Intrigued by Stan’s title and equally unique resume, I gave him a call in HOK’s San Francisco office, where he’s based, to ask “Five Questions.”

1. You are the director of carbon and climate action at HOK, and your bio says you will be “identifying and pursuing carbon market opportunities.” What does this mean?

SW: I think it means HOK is drawing a much bigger circle around what we do. The word “carbon” …

As you’ve read, HOK is big into sustainability, and part of our committment is personal – we’ve signed up numerous teams to compete in national bike-to-work month, sponsored by the cascade bicycle club (see Blake’s posts on HOK vs. Copenhagen and Calling all HOKers).  Tim O’Connell cooerced me into signing up using fear of public humiliation as his primary tactic. 

It’s a bit of a long ride for me (13.824 miles each way, according to Gmaps Pedometer) and I’m not much of a cyclist, but what the heck!  My route takes me along Cameron Run in …

Last week in the Toronto studio, Guillermo (Gil) Peñalosa, Executive Director of Walk and Bike for Life and the former Commissioner of Parks, Sports and Recreation for the city of Bogotá, Columbia, joined us for a talk about his work, both past and present. The nearly 2-hour presentation, which could have easily been 6 if he wasn’t forced from the microphone, was one of those occasions where you left the room feeling motivated to create change. Now while most people would write an eloquently written article about the information he was conveying, I’m not about to do that. But what I am about to do is talk about the faults of his presentation.

I’m not sure about anyone …

This weekend I went to Copenhagen for a little jaunt with the girls. In the Rådhuspladsen (City Hall Square) there was an amazing urban planning experiment made of Lego. Upon investigation during a slightly tipsy walk home from dinner, I found out the Lego city was Olafur Eliasson’s work: The Collectivity Project. It’s an interactive installation that encourages everyone to join the construction of a micro-Copenhagen. This was the Danish-Icelandic artist’s contribution to U-TURN – Copenhagen’s festival for contemporary art.

If you haven’t been to Copenhagen I really do recommend it for a weekend trip. There’s some amazing architecture and of course you’re surrounded by beautiful, sleek, Scandinavian design wherever you look.

Enjoy the photos – I was rather taken by …

Todd, I thought you might enjoy this since your last post was about cycling and being cycle-sensitive (like Copenhagen). MIT’s SENSEable City lab has introduced a new initiative for Copenhagen called CopenCycle. The overall goal of the project it seems is to look beyond the questions of ‘what’ we should be doing and saying, ‘now that we are doing it (it being cycling) what are the implications on society and technology’.

‘Smart-Biking’ is about taking our innovations of ‘social technologies’  and advancing them toward a cultural and transportation shift, such as biking in urban environments. The ‘smart tags’ will provide not only a connection to your friends via facebook application to …