WINTER INSPIRATION

Designing for discovery allows for the opportunity to refine the design and construction by focusing  and leveraging learning for future projects, sharing knowledge and lessons learned, occupant engagement, post-occupancy evaluations, and design that influences behavior. 

Designing for equitable communities effect more than the client and current occupants, it positively impacts the future by helping communities thrive by focusing on community, scale, social justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion, community engagement and empowerment, community resilience, and mobility and access. 

Designing for integration elevates any project, no matter how big or small by focusing on beauty and delight, central design and performance concept, connections with place, including climate, history, and people, and having an integrated design process. 

The goal with the Oregon Zoo Education Center is to create a sustainable building that is receptive, welcoming, and joyful, blurring the lines between inside and outside. A post-occupancy evaluation (POE) conducted in the winter of 2018 surveyed the building's wide range of occupants (education center, camp, teen program, food service, catering, animal care, and program staff, and partners) in an array of areas. Many core principles of the building design received positive responses. By monitoring energy use and production, several installation issues were discovered. 

A sensitive reimagining of Kevin Roche’s Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice balances preserving its innovative structure and making it more sustainable, healthy, and inclusive for the next generation. With an atrium in Midtown Manhattan that is open to all, this building became a renewed community resource. In addition, the project team elegantly added accessibility and universal design elements to provide an equitable experience for all inhabitants. 

This nonprofit lab/office facility serves as an incubator for biotech startups, helping ideas conceived locally to become local jobs and industries. Through integrated systems, building massing, and the enclosure, the New Orleans BioInnovation Center achieves high levels of performance that meet its programmatic requirements.