Since 2007, Metropolis, with editor in chief, Susan S. Szenasy has traveled to more than 35 cities and 150 architecture firms, design organizations, and industry shows in the United States and Canada delivering the Metropolis Tour. With the help of various sponsoring companies through the years, this Metropolis-produced CEU-accredited film screening and discussion program continues to inspire, intrigue, and challenge today’s practicing professionals in architecture, interior design, product design, and engineering. Sponsors for 2013 include KI, Kimball Office and Universal Fibers.

In 2007, our editor took a close look at the winners and runners-up from our annual Next Generation Design Competition and decided that the projects, products, and ways of working submitted as competition entries were not only forward-thinking—they were inspiring, innovative, and brilliant. The magazine decided to produce a new film for the Metropolis Tour program based on these individuals and teams. In mid-2008, Brilliant Simplicity was born. The film is as inspiring now, as it was four years ago.

The film delivers an overview of what so many innovative designers are doing to have a positive impact on the world while maintaining a commitment to achieving excellence in design. It’s proof that good design and sustainability can effectively coexist on all scales. It emphasizes the necessity for research and an ever-widening collaboration that, in the most fortuitous circumstances, can lead to innovation. And today, that word, innovation, has become our culture’s mantra.

From the largest and smallest offices of Gensler, Perkins+Will, HOK, LPA, NBBJ, Leo A Daly, and SOM to the various groups at Studios Architecture, Callison, Mithun, Shepley Bulfinch, and Cook+Fox, we’ve gained insight further into our own industry, and the culture of the design firms, and we’ve learned from each audience in a different way.

In her May 2010 Notes column, Lifelong Learning editor Szenasy states that “the future is clear: designers need to learn cross-disciplinary teamwork; to create a more sophisticated understanding of sustainable design; to reach out to larger communities and groups that have a voice in reshaping the urban form; to harness a new generation’s enthusiasm for saving the environment as well as its understanding of technology and connectivity.”

The film had a slow start before the design world fell off the cliff as the 2008 recession hit. Then it picked up momentum as design firms began to redefine themselves for the “new normal” and it continues to ignite conversations about the importance of research, collaboration, and innovation. LPA Architects in Irvine, CA documented the Metropolis Tour program they hosted in June:

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How can architects expand Western science and medicine into parts of the world with different cultural and traditional values?

Western designers have been designing healthcare facilities across the world since colonial times. For centuries, the flow of medical knowledge — as with the flow of military and financial power — was one-sided. But over the past two decades, as medicine became an important Western export, the world has become flat and this knowledge transfer has turned into a two-way street.

Today, we are participating in the globalization of Western medicine – its science, commerce, and philosophical underpinnings. We see evidence of the regionalization of the delivery of Western medicine with leading healthcare brands such as Johns Hopkins, Harvard Medical International, and The Cleveland Clinic placing their facilities and operations in emerging regions. The healthcare environments that Western architects are designing in Asia Pacific, the Middle East, and India are becoming living laboratories for global cultural integration.

This trend is forcing the convergence of scientific treatment with culturally responsive delivery. I call this “bridging the empathy gap.” By this I mean that we must hear what our clients in the countries where we work are not telling us and see what they are not showing us. We need to decipher their hidden messages.

Here are three stories that reveal how even subtle cultural differences can significantly impact the design of hospitals.

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As part of our involvement in the AIA 2030 Commitment Program and to support our commitment to designing high-performance buildings, we at HOK are applying energy modeling strategies on the majority of our projects. In 2011 our AIA 2030 report included more than 39 million gross square feet, with modeling performed on over 68 percent of that space.

Our firm has been conducting energy models on projects since the 1990s; an early example of this is the National Wildlife Federation Headquarters in Reston, Virginia. In 2000 that building was added to the US Department of Energy’s Database (DOE) for High Performance Buildings and became a DOE-2 energy model. We also did energy modeling for the US Environmental Protection Agency’s new campus in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina and SC Johnson’s Commercial Products Headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin. That same year we published The HOK Guidebook to Sustainable Design; it features a section on integrating energy performance.

By quantifying energy reductions through early architectural and engineering interventions, we can reduce the size and budget of mechanical and electrical systems. This allows us to apply those resources to architectural measures that enhance our clients’ spaces.

During bid and concept phases, we initiate energy benchmarking to guide the design team and owner through a discussion of energy use and metrics. We discuss CBECS (Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey) benchmarks and the typical loads of the equivalent building type, develop an Energy Star target score and formalize LEED goals.

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Last Thursday evening marked the finale of Duravit’s Design Week in New York City, a three-day celebration with films, trivia, food, wine, cocktails, and design discourse. It fell to Metropolis to add content to the proceedings by engaging two leading architects, an interior designer, and an industrialist in a discussion about the cultural forces that shape healthcare design around the globe.

The innovative bathroom products company, known for working with such designers as Norman Foster, partnered with Metropolis magazine for the evening’s discourse on “Global Wellness: A Discussion on Cultural Distinctions in Design,” led by editor-in-chief Susan S. Szenasy. The topic was inspired by the article, “A Culture of Caring,” in the current issue of the magazine, in which architect Mohammed Ayoub gives a fascinating account of the differences between designing such things as bathrooms in the Middle East and India. Ayoub, design studio lead & associate vice president and Brooke Horan, senior interior designer, both from HDR Architecture, were joined on the panel by Henry Chao, principal and healthcare design director, HOK, and Duravit’s CEO Frank Richter who flew in from Germany for the occasion. 

Duravit was celebrating three exciting new launches from Philippe Starck, Frank Huster, and Sieger Design, and guests entered a raffle to win an Oasis Signature Package at Oasis Day Spa in NYC.

Follow social media posts by searching the #DuravitDesignWeek hashtag, and enjoy the slideshow below:

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The “classic” Silicon Valley stretches from Palo Alto to south of San Jose, CA,
about 20 miles south of San Francisco.

Bay Area locals are mighty excited about Greenbuild coming to San Francisco in November.  The conference theme, “@ Greenbuild,” references the mindboggling array of Internet and technology companies headquartered in our backyards. You know Google, Yahoo, Twitter (co-founder, Biz Stone, will join us at the Greenbuild opening plenary), LinkedIn, Yelp, and YouTube.  Smaller social media outlets are also ubiquitous, including StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious, Yammer, Pinterest, and many more.  Of the 17 companies mentioned in a recent survey on social media for designers, all but one are headquartered here. (Tumblr hails from New York.  Rebels!)  We also have our host of gaming companies, many of whom tap into social networks; gamejobhunter lists over 120 companies nearby, from tiny start-ups to titans like EA and Zynga.

Our social media bonanza has roots in the original tech boom in Silicon Valley – named after silicon chip innovators – back in the 1970s.  What is Silicon Valley exactly?  Although the name originally referred to a specific region around Stanford University and San Jose, its tech prowess has spread throughout the region; the San Jose Mercury News recently argued that “Silicon Valley” now includes five Bay Area counties.  For many of us, though, Silicon Valley is more about a mindset and an approach to business that’s become synonymous with high tech innovation.  It has remained in this area because, as I once learned in a city planning class, companies that demand a stream of employees with the tech sector’s specialized mindset and skillset tend to thrive when they flock together.  (San Francisco’s tax break for tech companies probably doesn’t hurt either.)

Autodesk, another Bay Area tech giant,
enjoys a LEED CI Platinum certification for its One Market St. office space.
Photo by David Wakely, courtesy of HOK.

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Five years ago, Women in Green: Voices of Sustainable Design was published after Lance Hosey and I spent 18 months interviewing hundreds of people and trying to understand why it seemed like there was a preponderance of women doing “green” in many fields. Individual stories poured out and we assembled a suggestive but hardly conclusive collective story. We had the privilege of dipping in and were the beneficiaries of the generosity of an amazing community of creative people—but it’s clear that there is much more to discuss on the topic. We came away with an understanding that there are some sensibilities typically categorized as “female” by contemporary culture that tend to be effective in advancing sustainability goals. I’m reminded of this as I recall a recent conversation at Portland’s Living Future conference where I asked six people to engage in a dialogue with me about these sensibilities and how we can all find ways to cultivate and apply them.

Architect Bill Reed, of The Regenisis Group, whom I like to refer to as the uber-unpacker, talked about the need for us to start personal. He’s not talking about recycling at home before you try to start a business in the green space. He’s talking about a deep and personal knowing of yourself/life/place as a precursor for engagement with others.

Stacy Glass who works with the Cradle to Cradle Products Innovation Institute, talked about the importance of entrepreneurship and risk-taking. She used her experience of founding CaraGreen, a sustainable materials company in North Carolina, which eventually transitioned away from her original plans for it, as a demonstration of learning from failure.

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In my last post I argued for the need to enable face-to-face interactions, though I certainly didn’t mean to imply that we should require people to show up at the office every day. The big idea in the NetWork study is providing or enabling a choice of settings that support a breadth of needs. “Face-to-face” is one still-needed capability. Another is being able to move between several options for getting the work done.

Whether or not an organization recognizes or even actively supports it, chances are really good that work is happening in places (virtual or physical) that don’t resemble the familiar assigned seats approach. Whether someone travels to customers, or sits in meetings all day, works from home or at their neighborhood Starbucks, they are working in places and spaces other than a workstation. In fact, they are working in places other than “the office”. This shift is partly driven by the nature of modern work and partly by personal preferences.

The authors of our NetWork paper urge us to recognize, plan, and manage “the workplace” as an expansive network of settings – only some of which are under the control of influence of the organization. This implies that we need to provision workers - not just workplaces – to enable them to work anytime and anywhere.

Perhaps this gentleman has grown too comfortable working in the car.

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I admit it. I tend to overuse the phrase, “Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.” So here I go again. I’d like to point out that we need to bring two issues together when it comes to getting things done:  We need to temper our ability to do our work digitally and in places that aren’t offices and at the same time appreciate the role played by shared physical places in enabling performance.

In the first few pages of our Network paper, the authors emphasize the value of face-to-face interactions: They note that “the more we live in a digital world, the more important it becomes to reconnect with the physical environment. We’re spending more and more time working, socializing and playing in virtual settings. Communities of practice are expanding, effectively combining social and information networks. Games are becoming incredibly realistic – some in terms of sight and sound, while others replicate real life with virtual pets, babies, families, gardens. However… there are certain skills that are critical to successful face‐to-face social interaction, and we only master those skills by using them. So the physical environment remains vital to communication, interaction and developing skills”.

Google is known for thoughtfully provisioning workers: Visitors to any office can expect to find Googlers sharing cubes, yurts and “huddles”; video games, pool tables and pianos; cafes and “microkitchens”; and good old fashioned whiteboards for spur-of-the-moment brainstorming.

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As we, at the American Institute of Architects’ Young Architects Forum (AIA YAF) www.aia.org/yaf celebrate our 20 year anniversary, we find ourselves at a critical moment regarding the future of our chosen profession. Every day and too often we hear talk about losing a whole generation from the practice of architecture. Though new grads have the highest unemployment rate, the situation isn’t much better for those who have been around for a while, whether they’re going through the licensure process or are already licensed architects. And the hidden resentment of those who do have jobs is growing; they see a bleak outlook for their immediate future. This emerging professional group is clearly a victim of the economic downturn. So, with YAF’s focus on architects licensed less than 10 years, we decided it was time to get a handle on this sad situation.

Earlier this month 65 young leaders headed to Washington DC from all directions of the nation. The YAF Summit20, taking place just prior to the AIA Annual Grassroots Leadership Conference, was organized by the AIA National YAF Advisory Committee to dig into the issues facing the new generation of practitioners. We wanted to know what YAF and the AIA can do to help, and what our action plan should be for the next five years and beyond. YAF summits are held every five years and it was intriguing to see that the top three issues from Summit15 (mentorship, leadership, and fellowship) did not appear in the top six issues of the Summit20. We have a lot of work to do! Read more…

Early in the Project Haiti process, our team decided to meet the design requirements of the ICC 2009 International Building Code—also encouraged by the Haitian government for new construction since the 2010 earthquake. We were already familiar with the code and so we believed it would provide the best opportunity to create excellent design.  Selecting a code was also a means by which we could ensure the safety of occupants.

HOK has never worked in Haiti before. Our partner, the U.S. Green Building Council, is focused on adapting to a new global perspective in sustainable design. These two factors made for a project with unique challenges. And, we knew at the outset that we’d have difficulty following codes written for consumer-based, resource-rich nations.

Amidst the chaos in the earthquake’s aftermath, an underlying sense of self-enforced order supports the Haitian desire to own and operate at a Western standard. They, too, are looking to build fiscally sound, structurally stable, and economically progressive projects. The difficulty?  Haiti has very little infrastructure to support these goals. As we work with the code here, three items continually demand our attention: constantly checking on the realistic cost of building to code, developing an educated workforce to achieve code-compliant design, and the acquisition of materials in a resource-poor country.

It is easy to make assumptions about infrastructure in the U.S. An engineer working in St Louis, for instance, can have confidence that when she/he specifies a high-strength structural bolt, it will be available domestically, with little to no lead time, and at a reasonable price – all saving time and money while easily meeting the code.  This is not the case in Haiti. Port-au-Prince only recently acquired such basic things as garbage trucks – a welcome site for residents living on streets lined with goat-eaten trash and building debris.

How can our design team ethically move forward, given these circumstances? Do we scrap the code because construction costs too much? Should we assess the design by what we feel is good professional judgment? The answer is, clearly, No. The lack of local code is exactly why Haiti is in “rubble trouble” and why it continues to struggle to improve.

The residential streets of Port-au-Prince. (image courtesy of HOK).

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