THE PLEASURE OF LESS 07/22/08

Words  ::  Andrée Iffrig // Images  ::  Tom Arban, HOK

Bill Valentine is a self-confessed evangelist for sustainable design. Listening to him for the first time, you might be misled into thinking he was just a down home boy with an interest in climate change. Don’t let that disarming “aw shucks” exterior fool you. Valentine, chairman of HOK, has helped grow the firm from a small practice into one of the world’s largest architecture and engineering firms, with 26 offices on 4 continents. He’s greening the architectural agenda with the same zeal and business acumen used to build HOK.

Valentine was the final keynote speaker in March 2008 for the fourth edition of the Sustainable Environmental Design keynote series, hosted by the Calgary Chamber of Commerce and the University of Calgary. A company man, Valentine is modest to a fault about his personal contributions to the firm he has served since graduating in 1962 from the architecture program at Harvard. A shortlist of Valentine’s notable projects includes the Biogen Idec Research and Development Campus in San Diego, the Nortel Campus in Ottawa, Adobe Systems Inc. World Headquarters in San Jose, and the King Haled International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

Under Valentine’s leadership, HOK has been a prime mover behind the establishment of LEED, the system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council for rating a building’s level of sustainable design. A portfolio of the company’s green buildings was published in 2000, in “The HOK Guidebook to Sustainable Development.” Subsequently revised and updated, the guidebook is a bible for any design practitioner embarking on a journey into sustainable design.

HOK has also published a list of “10 simple things you can do without sacrificing budget, schedule, or program considerations” to put sustainable design into practice. HOK offices are expected to integrate sustainable design guidelines into every project, and its carbon footprint reduction program aims to reduce the firm’s carbon emissions in projects and operations by 50 percent by 2010. In a firm the size of HOK, with more than 2500 employees scattered across the globe, Valentine is quick to point out that he is just one of many point people for sustainability.

The chairman of HOK wants to talk with Canadian audiences about a syndrome he calls Affluenza. This peculiar North American malady is an extreme form of materialism that dupes consumers into thinking they can never have enough. According to Valentine, in their endless quest for more, consumers work ever longer hours while accumulating increasing levels of debt. The result for the planet isn’t beneficial either: “In the United States we’re four percent of the world’s population, and we’re using 25 percent of the resources. There’s something terribly wrong with that. We’re using up 25 percent of the world’s resources, yet we’re 48th in longevity – in a country that has hypothetically good health care. You could infer from that we’re just shopping ourselves, using ourselves crazy.” Affluenza conspires against sustainable development, especially when it comes to architecture and design.

Valentine has little patience with the star system in architecture that celebrates big names and expensive edifices, resulting in designs as ephemeral as today’s fashion. “It worries me quite a bit that architects are going around trying to get on covers of magazines when we need to solve urgent urban problems. There are so many needs to be solved, for infrastructure, and schools, and on and on, yet architects are out celebrating museums that cost $1000 per square foot.”

Andrée Iffrig is a writer and graduate architect with a passion for sustainable design.

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Pictures:

Details:

Killbear Provincial Park Visitor Centre
Nobel, Ontario
12,000 sq ft / 1115 sq m
Located along the Great Lakes Heritage Coast in Northern Ontario the centre fits within the landscape so as to respect the environment and its ecosystems. The building shifts, cants, twists and slopes like the surrounding landscape. Sustainable design strategies include using Georgian Bay as a heating and cooling system, using stormwater runoff to maintain wetlands of indigenous plant species, and recycled and recyclable building materials.

HOK’s Keshen Goodman Library, Halifax. A 2,300 s.m. public library. The structure is all structural steel on conventional spread footings.

Calgary’s Peter Lougheed Centre expansion project is a collaboration between HOK and Marshall Tittemore Architects