Earlier this month, KieranTimberlake researchers Billie Faircloth, Christopher Connock, and Ryan Welch attended the Smartgeometry conference in Toronto and conducted a week-long workshop called "Materials as Probes." The workshop was an outgrowth of an ongoing research collaboration between KieranTimberlake and the Center for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA) in Denmark about the design potential of thermodynamic modeling. 
 
Watch the video above and read more about the workshop on the Smartgeometry website.

The AIA has selected KieranTimberlake's studio at 841 North American Street as a 2018 Committee on the Environment (COTE) Top Ten Plus awardee. The COTE Top Ten honors projects that integrate environmental performance with design excellence, with a Plus designation reserved for projects with exemplary building performance metrics and occupant feedback. In their decision statement, the jury applauded our studio renovation for “emphasizing occupant comfort rather than prescribed metrics” and highlighted the way our firm “actively monitors, learns from, and improves the building's performance over time.”

Three months after architecture writer Witold Rybczynski outlined our journey to achieve passive comfort amidst Philadelphia's hot, muggy summers, we are proud to announce that Roast, the latest software application development project from KT Innovations, has been officially released for external beta testing.  
 
Designed to ease the process of conducting post-occupancy evaluations, Roast is a web-based survey app that captures how people experience their space. Created with ASHRAE standards in mind, Roast measures comfort using a range of factors including temperature, humidity, personal activity level, air quality and movement, and visual and auditory stimulation. Survey administrators can include any or all of these questions in customized surveys and can filter and analyze results directly in the app. Since responses are tied to each participant's location, Roast also helps identify trends and pinpoint improvements.

KieranTimberlake is proud to announce the elevation of 17 Principals, 19 Associates, four Directors, four Managers, and three Specialists. These new roles reflect the firm's steady expansion over the past 35 years as our team has grown to include 120 interdisciplinary professionals with backgrounds ranging from architecture and design to computation, urban planning, research, and visualization. Joining a leadership group that includes seven Partners, these individuals will continue to push our practice forward as they bring confidence, experience, and creativity to each of our projects.

In 2015, Rice University commissioned KieranTimberlake to design a combined administrative building and parking structure for a newly activated campus entrance in an area defined by live oaks, an alee of cedar elms, and longstanding campus buildings. “We needed to find a way to carefully situate this tall structure within the existing campus context,” Associate David Hincher said. 
 
Its position alongside the President's Office and the Cohen House, a popular indoor/outdoor event space, meant that the garage needed to do more than just blend in. It had to function within a distinctive landscape and extend a legacy of thoughtful planning at Rice.  
 
Our solution took the form of a paneled facade of woven, permeable polymer material. Cost effective, tensile, and incredibly strong, the material is stretched between trapezoidal paneled frames that are angled to break up the garage's scale, maintain visual interest, and create strategic breaks in the facade that allow light and natural air into the garage while reducing the glare that can be seen from its neighboring spaces. “Angling the panels away from the outer structure was our way of providing balance,” Hincher offered. “It helps enliven the facade as light and shadow pass across it, but it also helps to break down the scale of the building while ventilating the garage's interior to avoid the cost and emissions associated with mechanical ventilation.”

The US Embassy in London opened its doors to the media for the first time last month, nearly nine years after the Department of State's Overseas Building Operations first announced a design competition for the project. Having outgrown the current, Eero Saarinen-designed embassy in Grosvenor Square, the Department of State selected KieranTimberlake to build a new home for diplomacy that was open, transparent, and welcoming while still being secure and environmentally responsible. “In the form and expression of the new Embassy, we envisioned a holistic fusion of urbanism with site, of building and urban form with landscape,” said James Timberlake in his remarks to the press. “We wanted to create a new embassy that is both evocative and that performs, one that represents our democracy and our relationship with the United Kingdom beautifully but at the same time conserves and produces energy.”

This fall, our research on occupant behavior and building design made the news. In 2013, after conducting spatial survey research that explored the relationship between occupant behavior and urban park design, we began working with Dr. Bon Ku, the Assistant Dean for Health and Design and Director of JeffDESIGN at Thomas Jefferson University, to determine if this type of analysis could also be applied to the field of healthcare. In September, our resulting collaborative research was covered by the Philadelphia Inquirer. “People ask me: ‘Are you just trying to make the E.R. look prettier or polished, with the walls a more soothing color?'” Dr. Ku told the paper. “No. You can design spaces to change the behaviors of people.” 
 
Together with a team of Dr. Ku's doctors, nurses, medical students, and hospital administrators, we used spatial analytics to investigate how workspace layout affects communication and team interaction amongst nurses and doctors in the ER department. The primary goal of our research was to uncover opportunities to introduce design thinking and innovation to emergency departments.

In designing a 10,000-square-foot addition for Pendleton West, Wellesley College's art and music facility, we wanted to highlight and reflect the building's idyllic woodland site by creating a facade that mimics the pattern and texture of tree bark. We selected board-formed concrete as the primary building material for the addition, a process that imprints the grain and texture of the wood casting forms onto the concrete. “With a lot of concrete, you can't tell how it's made,” said Tim Peters, the Associate in Charge of the project. “With board-formed concrete, the memory of the wood used in the casting remains in the finished product. That was important for this building, since we wanted it to feel more like a tree than a building, but we also wanted to reference some of the stone that's prevalent throughout Wellesley's campus.”

How will wood age over time? What might it look like in six months, a year, or even 80 years after construction? We confronted these questions while designing new residence halls for the University of Washington. During design, we developed a concept for a cedar rainscreen that complements the buildings' brick and concrete facades, pays homage to the Pacific Northwest, and remains beautiful in its unfinished state. But, before featuring this material on 215,000 square feet of building envelope, we wanted to be sure that untreated, lower-maintenance wood could weather artfully in Seattle's damp climate. “Wood ages very visibly,” researcher Efrie Escott noted. “It can turn silver and become even more beautiful over time, or it can blacken and warp.”  
 
To better understand how the cedar rainscreen would change over time, KieranTimberlake developed a predictive modeling script that visualizes how wood ages in various locations. To do this, we gathered peer-reviewed research from laboratory weathering experiments and compiled the findings in a script that accounts for two principal factors influencing wood weathering: solar exposure and exposure to wind-driven rain. The first version of our Predictive Wood Weathering Tool included only those two variables because other factors, such as climate and airflow, were already accounted for. “There were some simplifications and assumptions that we were able to make because we knew the specific climate we were building in,” Escott said. “For example, we knew the rainscreen's exterior was likely to be saturated each day because we were building in a climate that reaches dew point every day.”  

KieranTimberlake's work on Wellesley College's Pendleton West was recently featured in Architectural Record. Written by Beth Broome, the article heralds the renovation and 10,000-square-foot addition as a prominent and accessible new gateway to Wellesley's historic Academic Quad. Though surrounded by predominantly brick buildings, Broome calls out Pendleton's concrete facade as a way to “help the building assert itself as a portal through its distinctiveness while subtly nodding to the [neighboring Rudolph and Klauder-designed] buildings, with their recast and limestone copings and trims,” adding that the precast and cast-in-place concrete panels “give the exterior a rich tactility.” 
 
To read the full article, click here.