KieranTimberlake is pleased to announce that three new projects have been honored with design awards by the American Institute of Architects, Autodesk, and the World Architecture Festival.  
 
High Horse Ranch, an off-site fabricated private residence in California's Mendocino County, won the Villa category at the World Architecture Festival in Amsterdam. It was also honored with Merit Awards from the AIA Philadelphia and the AIA California Council, as well as an Honor Award from the AIA Pennsylvania. Jurors were drawn to the way the ranch's main house and two guest cabins were carefully placed and designed to highlight their stunning natural surroundings. “The project is nestled seamlessly into the site and takes maximum advantage of the views,” the AIA Pennsylvania jury noted, adding that “the use of modular construction in such a remote location was captivating.” 

In Philadelphia, residents' life expectancy is a product of their zip code. That's what Dr. Bon Ku and Kr. Robert Pugulsi of Thomas Jefferson University's JeffDESIGN and Health Design Lab found while researching the health of Philadelphia's lower income communities, where life expectancy can swing as much as 20 years between neighborhoods.  
 
CoLab Philadelphia is an initiative born out of this research that aims to bring health and wellness outside of traditional medical facilities and directly into the neighborhoods that need it most. The Community Design Collaborative convened the New Kensington Community Development Corporation, Impact Services, Thomas Jefferson University's JeffDESIGN, KieranTimberlake, Ballinger and Cohere to convert an Airstream trailer into a mobile, multi-use platform that builds healthier communities through creative placemaking.  
 
“Health services are not readily accessible in a number of communities,” said Georgeanna Foley, a member of the design staff and leader of KieranTimberlake's CoLab team. “We wanted to design a creative, mobile, wellness-centered space, but faced a number of questions: What is a mobile health service? What issues should it address? What is health at the community level?”  
 
To answer these questions, we met with Kensington residents to discuss what makes a community healthy, what residents need to lead healthier lives, and what role they saw CoLab Philadelphia playing in their neighborhood, as well as how designers, policy makers, non-profits, and healthcare providers can work together to bring wellness into different neighborhoods.  

KieranTimberlake was recently named a Design Company of the Year Finalist as part of Fast Company's 2018 Innovation by Design Awards. The annual awards recognize creative, problem-solving designers and business across 15 different categories. In addition to Design Company of the Year, KieranTimberlake earned accolades for our work on Ideal Choice Homes (Social Good Finalist), Roast (Space, Places, and Cities Finalist), and the US Embassy in London (Space, Places, and Cities Honorable Mention).

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.