The Dogrun
a place to share ideas
A giant smile breaks across my face when Jeannette visits my desk - she is either asking to help me with something or offering some crazy baked goodie. I think it's her smile that goes airborne and infects other people causing them to break out in senseless smiles. Or maybe she puts something in those baked concoctions - they aren't normal ingredients, you know. I'm not sure they ever make it to the other floors. Jeannette's first task was to help me take notes for a client meeting - the meeting was 6 hours long, discussing 4 different buildings in 4 different phases and yes, just one client...
November was a big month for the Josey pavilion. After winning an AIA San Antonio Honor Award and celebrating its official grand opening, the pavilion is still operating as predicted, recording an energy surplus of 68 kWh after two months of occupancy. This is the third post of a thirteen post series on the process of obtaining Living Building Status. Each month over the next year, we will be posting an update on our water and energy usage as well as an overview on how we achieved each of the 20 imperatives mandated by The Living Building Challenge. After a solid performance in October, Josey...
Lake|Flato's Andrew Herdeg will serve as a juror for AIA New York's inaugural COTE Awards . The local awards program was inspired by the national AIA COTE Top 10 program , which awards the 10 best projects for sustainable design in North America each year. The AIANY COTE Awards will recognize truly sustainable projects within 100 miles on Manhattan that set the standard for both beauty and performance.
Recently, a few of us traveled to GreenBuild in New Orleans to see what’s new in the world of sustainability. Though the official theme of the conference was resilience (particularly relevant given the host city) a few other hot topics kept popping up. Here are three major themes that I noticed from Greenbuild 2014. Disclosure is hip! In 1906, journalist Upton Sinclair publish his novel “The Jungle” which revealed to the public the unsanitary and dangerous conditions in American meatpacking plants. Less than a year later, the US government passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and...
In honor of Lake Flato’s thirtieth anniversary, the Thirty Projects x Thirty Years series has been developed to explore and celebrate the firm’s history and culture of design. Published weekly, the series will highlight one project per year, starting in 1984 and ending in 2014. The projects that have been selected will give you a snapshot of the firm’s evolution as well as provide a fun and insightful collection on then and now, and ultimately, who we are today. 2003 was a big year for San Antonio sports and for Lake Flato. The Spurs won the NBA Championship again and the Lake Flato offices...
Each year, firms that have signed up for the AIA 2030 Commitment report their progress toward the 2030 Challenge in their design work. Lake|Flato is proud to have participated and reported in the AIA 2030 Commitment program since its inception. The AIA produces an annual report summarizing the results of everyone's reports. The 2013 report has just been released and is rife with interesting data on our industry's progress toward carbon neutrality.
The Josey Pavilion, our first project seeking Living Building Challenge certification, began its operational phase on October 1 st and things are looking good. During the month of October, Josey Consumed 139 kWh of electricity and generated 358 kWh. This is net positive usage of 219 kWh, meaning that 219 kWh of energy were sent back into the grid. Josey generated about 25% less energy than predicted, which is a little disconcerting but it also used less than half the energy that we had anticipated. A few more months like this and we should be in the clear. This is the second post of a twelve...
In honor of Lake Flato’s thirtieth anniversary, the Thirty Projects x Thirty Years series has been developed to explore and celebrate the firm’s history and culture of design. Published weekly, the series will highlight one project per year, starting in 1984 and ending in 2014. The projects that have been selected will give you a snapshot of the firm’s evolution as well as provide a fun and insightful collection on then and now, and ultimately, who we are today. It is difficult to look back at 2001 and not feel consumed by the September 11 attacks and its massive impact on the world. In pop...
Lake|Flato's Ryan Jones will be presenting at Facades+ this upcoming Friday in Dallas, Texas. He will be sharing our firm's work in passive envelope design, including case study information on a project we have under construction at Georgia Tech. We hope you'll be able to come out and attend his workshop !
My wife Bekah works for a luxury tour operator . Once a year she gets sent on familiarization trips to South America. I go along for the free hotel rooms. Yes this really is every bit as ideal of a setup as it sounds. I also have a strong interest in hotel design here at Lake|Flato, and so these South America adventures are basically big happy research trips for both of us. Bekah meets with tour guides and tests out the horseback riding, and I salivate over the exposed trusses in our hotels and measure the widths of corridors when no one's looking. (Also you would not believe how hard it is...
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