The AIA Convention comes to Philadelphia on May 19. Not sure what to do in your downtime? Click the link below to check out our guide to food, neighborhoods, and nightlife in the City of Brotherly Love.

Partner James Timberlake was honored as a distinguished alumnus this past week at his alma mater, the University of Detroit Mercy. Timberlake was the recipient of the Spirit of UDM: Alumni Achievement Award, an honor given by the university to recognize outstanding graduates who have excelled in their chosen field and have demonstrated leadership both in their careers as well as in their greater community.  
 
During a celebration weekend honoring award recipients, Timberlake credited the university with his early professional development. "These folks, and the university at large, helped to transform me and guide me to a dream that I've had since I was five," Timberlake said in his acceptance speech, "and that was to become an architect." 
 
To hear the rest of his remarks, click here.  

KieranTimberlake is pleased to announce the opening of KieranTimberlake: Drawn + Quartered, an exhibit of drawings, scale models, and mock-up experiments that survey the role of research and prototyping in our design process.

KieranTimberlake participated in this year's AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) Hackathon hosted at the Consortium for Building Energy Innovation (CBEI), a building designed by the firm in 2014. The event was attended by teams of students and professionals alike with the goal of connecting designers, developers, architects, and engineers with new technologies for the built environment.

When working in a new climate, researchers and designers at KieranTimberlake go to great lengths to investigate the design challenges inherent to the environment. During an early design meeting for the North Campus Housing project at the University of Washington, KieranTimberlake's team observed a campus landscape brimming with moss, algae, and lichen. These types of biological growth (“bio-growth”) are ubiquitous in the Pacific Northwest, clinging to windowsills, carpeting sidewalks, and decorating buildings. Located in a temperate rainforest climate zone with plentiful rain and cloud cover, the University of Washington's campus presented a unique set of challenges for the design team.

Partner Stephen Kieran was a guest earlier this month on the Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC, New York City's NPR station. Focusing on his work with fellow partner James Timberlake on the Dhaka Design-Research Laboratory, Kieran discussed the challenges facing the city of Dhaka, Bangladesh, as well as the book inspired by their research, Alluvium: Dhaka, Bangladesh, in the Crossroads of Water. 
 
Home to a population three times as dense as Manhattan and built on a constantly changing floodplain, Dhaka is one of the most extreme cities on earth. Kieran and Timberlake have been working with the University of Pennsylvania School of Design for nearly a decade in a research design studio that studies the relationship between the people of Dhaka and the various waterways that connect the city. Their research has culminated in their book Alluvium.  
 
When asked about the book's title, Kieran stated that "we in the U.S. really think of land and water as very separate things. [Bangladeshis] as people don't have a sense of the otherness or separateness between land and water. They think of the two as one in the same. Hence the term "alluvium," which is land suspended in water." 
 
To listen to the full interview, click here. 

Associate Professor Naomi Frangos from the New York Institute of Technology's School of Architecture and Design recently invited Partner Stephen Kieran to speak about KieranTimberlake's ethic of improvement and the ways in which it leads to invention and innovation. Kieran discussed the tactics used to give rise to empathetic planning and design, citing examples from the firm's practice as well as from his work with fellow partner James Timberlake on the Dhaka Design-Research Laboratory. 
 
The Dhaka Design-Research Laboratory is a cross-disciplinary design studio held at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design. Through intensive research and annual visits, the studio seeks new ways to stimulate relevant design interventions, and to model a research-based approach for urban planning in both the developing and the developed worlds.

The much-anticipated renovations at Philadelphia's LOVE Park officially began last month with a groundbreaking ceremony. Attended by Mayor Jim Kenney along with other city officials, the ceremony marks the start of the year-long upgrading process that will temporarily close the park. During construction, however, the beloved LOVE statue by Robert Indiana will still be available for residents and visitors to enjoy at Dilworth Park, another KieranTimberlake project that was completed this past summer.  
 
Once completed, the redesigned LOVE Park will be include a new fountain, a café, and additional green space. The existing and iconic features of the park, such as the "Flying Saucer" Welcome Center, will receive energy-efficient updates while becoming ADA accessible.  

Read more about the LOVE Park renovations

• LOVE Park Redesign Kicks Off with Groundbreaking
• “A Bold New Vision for LOVE Park” by Inga Saffron, Philadelphia Inquirer
• “Designers Show Saucer Some Love” by Ashley Hahn, PlanPhilly
• “The Saucer and the Fountain(s) Will Live On at the New Love Park” by James Jennings, Philadelphia Magazine

When we moved into our new studio last year, we loved that it gave us more room to create. Whether it's full-sized building mockups or a high-stakes maple syrup cook-off, 2015 has been a year of making for all of us at KieranTimberlake. We asked our colleagues to reflect on their most notable creative acts of the past year, and here's what they told us. How will you make the best of 2016?

KieranTimberlake kicked off the year by providing kits containing the latest generation of its sensor platform to user groups in Philadelphia and Copenhagen. Since receiving Architect Magazine's R+D Award in 2013, the network has been refined and is heading toward commercial roll-out in 2016.  
 
Each kit contains the gear to self-install a high-density sensor network and track temperature and relative humidity measurements in real-time via a custom web interface. The kits have myriad applications across many scales from walls to whole buildings to landscapes, and more.  
 
Testers at Drexel University's Dragon Hacks 2016 experimented with the network, building special purpose web applications that leverage real-time sensor data using its API.  
 
In a workshop led by Billie Faircloth and Ryan Welch at the Centre for Information Technology and Architecture (CITA), students were challenged to use sensors to measure the changes in temperature within a series of volumes designed to demonstrate types of thermal responsiveness in the outdoor climate of Copenhagen. 
 
KieranTimberlake currently uses the sensors to monitor climate conditions in its Philadelphia studio. Using data captured by the system in conjunction with passive heating and cooling strategies and comfort surveys, the firm has developed a highly nuanced understanding of the factors influencing its internal microclimates.  
 
Look for more on the sensor network developed by KieranTimberlake's affiliate, KT Innovations, in the coming year.