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Lake|Flato strives to create restorative environments that reduce carbon emissions and enhance our understanding and relationship with the natural world. Our work reflects the belief that sustainability and design are two sides of the same coin — balanced, integrated, and inseparable. We design beautiful, healthy, highly efficient design solutions and system strategies that are tailored to each project and location. Design performance provides us with a clear path to achieving sustainability by integrating design with building performance, technology, research, innovation, and equity...
Audrey is a designer at our San Antonio office whose architectural passion is based in exercising the ability to design with creativity and mindfulness. She strives to have meaningful impacts through sustainability, community-centric values, and creating designs that enhance the quality of life. We are lucky to have her join the Lake|Flato team! To read her professional bio, click here . For the fun existential questions, keep scrolling: Favorite Lake|Flato Project: Confluence Park & Naples Botanical Garden Visitor Center. Both were major influences during my academic career as precedents...
We are excited to announce the release of the AIA Climate Action Business Playbook. This resource was created by Lake|Flato , Buro Happold , Sustainable Performance Institute , unabridged Architecture . Project Team The project team included: Heather Holdridge , Director of Design Performance, Lake|Flato Dan Stine , Director of Design Technology, Lake|Flato Aurora Jensen , Embodied Carbon Lead, Brightworks Sustainability Varun Kohli , AVP - Real Properties, Battery Park City Authority Barbra BatShalom , Founder & CEO, Sustainable Performance Institute Allison Anderson , Principal,...
“Excellent learning environments are supported by high-performance design. Studies have reinforced and quantified what we have intuitively known – that student health and performance improve with well-designed learning environments, spaces that support student connectivity to each other, nature, daylight, fresh air, views to the surrounding community and natural resources, etc. Early in the concept phase, our design and client team established a goal of having 100% of the school's learning spaces be daylight autonomous to support the educational and mental well-being of students, faculty, and...
Since our founding in 1984, Lake|Flato has expanded to all floors and corners of our office at 311 Third Street in San Antonio. After committing to renovating our office into a healthy, high-performing, hybrid workplace, we decided to go against the grain of the building’s origins as a former car dealership and remove all parking and cars to create a community-centric outdoor living room. For a firm with a focus on sustainability, expanding our office meant removing rather than adding, and encouraging human and environmental health through outdoor amenities, connections to nature, and...
Every architectural visualization is a challenge in itself. For some projects, fidelity to style and detail is particularly important, while for others, authenticity in harmony with the surrounding environment is key. The talented team at Lake|Flato combines these components and brings the environmental aspect and the sustainability of the planned buildings even more into their Enscape renderings. For that reason, we are very happy to share the following guest post with you. Enjoy! Creating Enscape Visualizations The team uses various design technologies, from energy and daylight simulation...
As an architectural design firm that makes a concerted effort to incorporate sustainable design goals into all our projects, Lake|Flato uses many tools to challenge our assumptions and validate decisions. For efficiency, we also look for ways to streamline our efforts and even democratize workflows such that design teams might accomplish their own analysis without relying on, and possibly waiting for, a specialist to do it for them. To this end, an important part of implementing a new tool or workflow is to verify the accuracy of the results. This post will, at a high level, outline our early...
Designing meaningful, high-performance buildings and landscapes is not a passive act. The process necessitates a sustained exercise in discerning the interconnections between environmental and human health, cultural resilience, and inclusive community building. The ties that bind are subtle yet irrevocable, with each affecting the others. To truly provide value through equitable design strategies, every community member, visitor, guest, and employee should be welcomed and be able to navigate a building or landscape confidently, independently, and with choice and dignity, avoiding separation...
Embodied Carbon Update: Investigations and Greenbuild In 2009, Lake|Flato began its carbon reduction journey when we adopted the 2030 Challenge and started tracking operation carbon on all projects. Carbon is also known as the greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) associated with global warming potential (GWP). Buildings account for 39% of global GHG emissions, making it a high priority for designers to help reduce carbon through both operational and embodied methods. Embodied carbon specifically refers to the GWP associated with the GHG emissions produced during a material’s full life cycle (...
Flake Lato, our annual retreat on the headwaters of the West Nueces, at the tail end of summer, just before children return to school, is always one of the most special weekends of the year. But this year, due to COVID-19, and our remote working conditions, it was more special than ever. Together, we had made it through a difficult year. Spread out all over the country and starved for camaraderie, Flake Lato was a timely and much anticipated antidote. The “seal team,” the early strike force that pulls up the shade structures and gets things organized, showed up Thursday evening, and things...
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