Ideas Flow Freely Within HOK's Holistic Team

Every opinion counts at HOK. The 59-year-old firm embraces an interdisciplinary approach that values feedback from everyone: architects, engineers, planners and consultants. The resulting cross-pollination of free-flowing ideas and strategies produces innovative structures, some of which emulate the natural world to maximize sustainability.

"We want an integrated team, as opposed to consultants, embedded throughout the project process from start to finish," says Russ Drinker, a HOK senior vice president and San Francisco office management principal. "A more holistic design approach produces high performance results."

The approach was used to design the $188.8-million Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center (ARTIC), scheduled to open in November. The building's centerpiece, a three-story, 67,000-sq-ft terminal, uses four-and-a-half football fields of transparent pillow cladding made from ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, a lightweight but resilient plastic, to optimize daylighting and thermal efficiency for a 50% energy reduction. The 120-ft-tall building, on 15.7 acres, acts as a symbolic gateway for the Platinum Triangle, a prominent mixed-use development district that includes Angel Stadium and Honda Center. The arching terminal is supported by a diagrid pipe frame made up of 2,100 tons of structural steel and 1.5 miles of weld. The project is expected to achieve LEED-Platinum certification.

The "integrated design and modeling optimized the structure," said an American Institute of Architects jury, which gave the project an award for innovative BIM use that improved operational efficiency and helped deal with a compressed construction schedule and included 3D modeling of pedestrian and vehicular traffic patterns.

Transportation last year accounted for roughly one-third of HOK's $57 million of in-state revenue, supported by 300 employees across two offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The St. Louis-based company traveled to California in 1966 for the design of Stanford University's library in Palo Alto. HOK has since expanded its presence and reputation in the state through a diverse portfolio of progressive energy-efficient projects that include airports, corporate campuses, schools, medical facilities and science and technology buildings.

"Our charrette-like design process takes different viewpoints and combines them into an 'ask' session— art, science and knowledge—where intersecting input is synthesized and vetted," says the firm's San Francisco design director Paul Woolford.

HOK's uniquely comprehensive approach produced the campus master plan for Kaiser Permanente's $275-million Redwood City Medical Center. Organized around a new public open space, the scheme connects the city's business district to major streets and public transportation while restoring the Redwood Creek embankment. HOK additionally designed the first phase of a seven-story, 283,100-sq-ft replacement hospital with 149 beds.

"[We] were skeptical that HOK would be able to fit so many functionalities into a tight site with a building footprint almost one-third smaller than similar hospitals with as many patient beds," says Jeff Russell, project executive with Rudolph and Sletten, the hospital's general contractor. "But they pulled it off, working with us every step of the way to find attractive design solutions to every construction detail challenge."

The building uses bonded brace frame construction with diagonal beams to absorb lateral forces during an earthquake, thereby preventing buckling and subsequent structural steel failure. The solution, originally developed in Japan, has increasingly been used in the U.S. following the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Its use on the Kaiser Permanente project attracted a fact-finding delegation of engineers and physicians from earthquake-prone Turkey.

"The HOK team has embraced the fast-paced evolution of technology, helped us leverage it to deliver construction faster and to an extreme degree of accuracy," Russell says. The hospital is expected to achieve LEED-Silver certification upon completion in December.

HOK encourages its employees to acquire LEED accreditation and embraces AIA's 2030 goal of addressing climate change and eliminating global greenhouse emissions through sustainable building design. HOK ranks fourth in revenue generated from sustainable projects in California during 2013.

"It's not good enough to just apply sustainable rules," says Ernest Cirangle, design director for HOK's Los Angeles office. "You have to ingrain sustainable thinking into the design process, making it an essential part of your process and culture."

Biology Inspires Design

HOK's design for the San Francisco Museum, for instance, adapts an 1874 federal landmark and a rare survivor of the 1906 earthquake into a net-zero building. The 102,000-sq-ft museum will be housed inside the four-story former Mint building, nicknamed the Granite Lady, which has stood vacant at Mission and Fifth streets since 1995. The project, expected to achieve LEED-Platinum status, is currently awaiting a second round of funding following a $13-million initial pre-planning phase.

"HOK listened intently to our group of stakeholders and fashioned a design that embodied and enlarged upon our vision," says Jeff Sosnaud, interim executive director of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society. "Their team is both creative and collaborative —an all too rare combination."

The Mint's 5-ft-thick heat-efficient walls, natural ventilation and radiant floor-slab heating make for an operationally carbon-neutral project. A new glass-and-steel canopy floats over the existing courtyard and maximizes ventilation and temperature control.

A ceramic dot screen raised above the glass surface diffuses sunlight while providing more surface area for collecting water from fog and condensation.

"We investigated how native Bay Area plant life captures precipitation," says Woolford. "We discovered that, to collect this water, many [plants] are covered in tiny nodules that give them more area to capture water."

When the water drains off the glass, it is captured by rooftop cisterns. This water is combined with reuse wastewater from the building, which is then filtered through a wetland ecology of plants and beneficial bacteria on the roof to create clean potable water, resulting in a net-zero water building with no consumption from city supplies. The approach uses natural world efficiency to solve design problems.

"When it comes to designing for efficiency, balance and resiliency, nothing beats emulating Earth's creatures," says Thomas Knittel, HOK senior design principal in Los Angeles. "Architects can bridge the gap between the built and natural environments through biomimicry, an emerging field of study urging emulation of naturally occurring principles and processes."

For the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Daniel K. Inouye Regional Center at the Pearl Harbor joint base in Honolulu, HOK turned to native Hawaiian trees to develop a grid of rooftop apertures with 4-ft-sq tubes that carry direct sunlight down into the structure, which comprises two renovated World War II-era airplane hangars joined by a new building. Translucent reflectors capture and distribute light while mitigating glare through reflection. The system, inspired by tree leaves, creates even, natural light levels throughout the adaptive reuse building, cutting electric lighting requirements by 50%.

The $331-million, LEED-Gold project, dedicated in December, also features Hawaii's first passive cooling system, which uses seawater to cool prevailing breezes for natural ventilation through an underground air distribution system. "It's one example of how we reverse-engineered a specific ecological feature while meeting ecosystem needs," Knittel says.

HOK's California operations continue to be in high demand for creative project solutions, and the firm anticipates a 7% increase in revenue next year. "We work together with our clients and contractors, maintaining solid relationships. In fact, we have no pending claims against us," Drinker says. "We believe in maintaining an environment of respect and professionalism."