In the Mongolian city of Ulaanbaatar, the cold climate and air pollution go hand in hand. The city is the coldest capital on earth, and its population relies largely on coal to survive the harsh winters. As a result, 42% of Mongolia's children suffer from pollution-related health effects and Ulaanbaatar is home to the most toxic air on earth. 
 
To help reduce the city's pollution and bring cleaner air to its residents, a UNICEF Innovation team including KieranTimberlake, Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, and others traveled to Ulaanbaatar to reimagine the traditional ger. By incorporating better insulation and healthier heating options, the team aims to maintain ger culture while also helping families save money and breathe easier.  
 
During the trip, which was recently featured in Forbes, the team built their own traditional ger and met with community members to better understand their wants and needs. The lessons learned from these experiences informed a series of prototypes currently in development that test different materials and technologies. The final prototypes will be evaluated in Ulaanbaatar in the winter of 2019.  
 
Watch the video above or read the full article to learn more about the project and how you can help.  

The Northern Liberties Neighbors Association (NLNA) recently celebrated the opening of its new Pavilion designed by KieranTimberlake's Community Involvement group and funded through a grant from the Penn Treaty Special Services District. Located just a few blocks from our studio, the NLNA Pavilion provides a permanent landscaped space for the community to host many types of events.

KieranTimberlake recently joined Brown University to celebrate the official dedication of a new Engineering Research Center. The state-of-the-art research facility, which broke ground in October 2015, establishes a unified identify for the School of Engineering while also expanding the University's capacity for multidisciplinary collaboration. This project also marks Brown's first new building executed with a multi-party integrated project delivery agreement.  

“This building is a statement about the importance of engineering at Brown and also the world at large,” University President Christina Paxson said during the dedication ceremony, adding that the University's goal is “to blend engineering with a keen appreciation and understanding of the humanities, ethics, and social sciences.”

 
The new Engineering Research Center joins together three existing buildings, creating a welcoming convening point for the School of Engineering and the greater campus complete with a configurable common space and lawn that accommodates study groups, poster sessions, receptions, meetings, events, art shows, and more. The building, which is tracking LEED Gold certification, hosts specialized research facilities for nanomaterials, photonics, and environmental science, and is designed to expand research in renewable energy, advanced materials, and other areas. 
 
The project team included Shawmut Design and Construction as Contractor, Research Facilities Design for Laboratory Planning, BuroHappold for Structural and MEP Engineering, Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, Inc. for Civil Engineering, Gustafson Guthrie Nichol for Landscape, and Vidaris for Sustainability Consulting. 
 
To read more about the Engineering Research Center, click here.  

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 and transparent, while still being secure and welcoming. “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.