The Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce has selected KieranTimberlake as a recipient of its 2016 Excellence Awards honoring small businesses. This award recognizes small businesses for their vital role in the economic development of the Greater Philadelphia region.
Winners are nominated by their regional business peers based on their demonstrated commitment to the advancement of the business community as well as their civic involvement and responsiveness, corporate responsibility, employee recognition, and concerns regarding service issues.
KieranTimberlake received the 2016 award for Professional Services Excellence in recognition of its commitment to delivering the highest quality architectural services. Area firms including Hopeworks 'N Camden, the Brownstein Group, University City Science Center, and BuLogics, Inc. took home awards in other categories.
GPCC President and CEO Rob Wonderling said, “Each of this year's recipients models how organizations can make a difference, contribute to the region's economy and be outstanding leaders in their respective fields. The Chamber is proud to honor their hard work, innovation and creativity through the Excellence Awards.”
KieranTimberlake partner Matthew Krissel presented on the topic of digital design culture at KA Connect 2015, a knowledge management conference for the AEC industry.
He talked about how KieranTimberlake created a platform to facilitate knowledge sharing and innovation—with a focus on the firm's members, and their relationships to one another, rather than solely the tools they would use. By developing a formalized network of exploratory behavior in the office, team members could experiment with and even implement new technologies in a matter of months. Watch as he describes the facets of this platform at KA Connect.
Following on the recent announcement of five new partners, ten staff members have been named associates of the firm. As KieranTimberlake has continued to grow and take on new projects both nationally and internationally, additional leadership opportunities have emerged. These individuals have helped shape the development of the practice over the past decade. They have been recognized for their extensive design and research experience, their leadership qualities, their commitment to excellence in their work, and their service to the firm.
Founding partner James Timberlake remarked, “Stephen Kieran and I join our new partners in welcoming the new associates to the management group of the firm. They all have been creative and active participants in advancing the firm agenda and culture. We look forward to their contributions as the firm continues to design, innovate, and invent new worlds.”
KieranTimberlake's leadership now includes seven partners and 19 associates in an office of nearly one hundred professionals.
KieranTimberlake is proud to announce the publication of Plastics Now by firm partner Billie Faircloth. The book is available for purchase from Routledge (June 11, 2015) and Amazon (July 5, 2015).
Plastics Now: On Architecture's Relationship to a Continuously Emerging Material
Billie Faircloth Published by Taylor & Francis Group, Routledge
Plastics Now addresses one primary question: why do we build with plastics the way that we do? For decades, plastics have been described over and over again as “the future”—yet we still do not know precisely what to do with them. Billie Faircloth argues that this inertia is due to plastics' indecipherability, which has prevented them from becoming fully known. The author tracks the process by which plastics became defined as a class of building materials. Drawing on new, original data from the industry press, beautifully drawn original timelines, hundreds of historical and contemporary images, advertisements dating to the 1950s, and technical data, this unconventional book explores the emergence of plastics as a building material and presents new findings.
Architects and researchers from KieranTimberlake are speaking across the country at a range of venues on themes related to research-driven practice and environmental responsibility in architecture.
On June 25, Billie Faircloth will deliver a keynote address at the Building Technology Educators' Society 2015 International Conference in Salt Lake City. On July 14, Stephanie Carlisle and Steven Baumgartner of BuroHappold will present Strengthening Sustainability Action Plans: Expanding the Scope of Carbon Assessments to an international audience at SCUP-50 in Chicago.
Earlier this year, Stephen Kieran spoke with Harvard GSD students on the strategies, tools, and tactics for integrated practice. David Riz took part in a plenary session at the BEST4 Conference with Steve Kemp, Manager of Sustainable Building at MMM Group Limited, and John Straube, Building Scientist at the University of Waterloo.
Matthew Krissel discussed high-performance envelopes before a sold-out crowd at the Facades+ workshop in April. At the 2015 AIA Convention in Atlanta in May, Efrie Friedlander and Jason Smith revealed how our Revit plug-in called Tally® can make Life Cycle Assessment one of many influencing factors in developing a sustainable building design.
Inspired by our book on Loblolly House, clients in California asked us to design an off-site fabricated home uniquely tuned to their steeply sloped site in the mountains of Mendocino County. The clients, a physician and a Silicon Valley electrical engineer turned artist, envisioned the home as a weekend getaway from San Francisco. It includes a 2,600 square-foot house and two free-standing studio structures of 300 square feet each.
KieranTimberlake's new studio was once the bottling house of Ortlieb's Brewing Company in Northern Liberties, Philadelphia.
Architect, professor and writer Witold Rybczynski describes the new KieranTimberlake studio as a "model of 21st century office space" in an article in Architect magazine. Rybczynski visited the office in April and interviewed founding partner Stephen Kieran and researcher Roderick Bates.
Rybczynski says the new office is not a showpiece but a hands-on workplace—whose glassed-in fabrication shop is the first view that greets visitors entering the building. The article draws on studies of workplace psychology and human comfort, mentioning the natural light and fresh air that are key features of this renovated industrial building, as well as the flexibility for employees to make choices about their workspace by moving desks and reconfiguring spaces.
The new studio's sustainability attributes include a cooling strategy that foregoes air conditioning in favor of opening windows in the monitor, using exhaust fans, supplying night-cooled air via the floor plenum, and dehumidifying the air. Rybczynski describes this as a "daring experiment" during a Philadelphia summer—one that involves 400 temperature and humidity sensors embedded in the building and regular surveys of KieranTimberlake's 100-person staff regarding their comfort levels.
An early rendering of the LOVE Park Welcome Center, designed by Roy Larson of Harbeson, Hough, Livingston & Larson in the late 1950s, conveys the spirit of the original building, guiding development of KieranTimberlake’s renovation strategy. Image courtesy Fairmount Park Archives
A recent public meeting on the new design for LOVE Park included the announcement by Philadelphia's Parks & Recreation department, Hargreaves Associates, and KieranTimberlake that the renovated park will retain the iconic Welcome Center beloved by many Philadelphians.
The round, mid-century modern building was designed in the late 1950s and was a symbol of optimism in post-war Philadelphia as many American urban centers went into a long period of decline. Its continuing popularity among the public was revealed during Penn Praxis-led civic engagement efforts that preceded design work for LOVE Park.
Architectural Record recently featured Pound Ridge House on its list of Record Houses for 2015. The list includes eight residential projects that "push the limits of spatial concepts and materiality or refine the existing vocabulary in imaginative ways"—including examples from Los Angeles, Tokyo, Marbella, and elsewhere.
Pound Ridge House is a 5,000 square-foot single-family home located on a wooded, boulder-strewn site in the town of Pound Ridge, New York. The home exists in unique harmony with its natural surroundings, its exterior walls creating a visual display that varies with time of day, season, and quality of light. As the author writes, "The cladding performs almost as camouflage, especially at the corners, where the use of the mirrorlike stainless-steel panels makes the building's edges practically disappear."
On the Rocks: A house wrapped in a sophisticated skin makes the most of a site with challenging topography. By Joann Gonchar, AIA
In spite of high-profile projects like the U.S. embassy now under construction in London, Philadelphia-based architecture firm KieranTimberlake still sometimes accepts commissions for challenging single-family houses. “They are an opportunity to try out things that would be tougher on a larger project,” says design partner Stephen Kieran.
Susan Richardson of NewsWorks/WHYY recently visited KieranTimberlake's new workspace inside the former bottling plant of the Henry F. Ortlieb brewery in the Northern Liberties neighborhood of Philadelphia. In her blog titled Human at Work, she discusses the ways in which the renovated plant adapts to the needs of workers, rather than asking workers to adapt to it.
Calling the open-plan studio a "cathedral-like space," Richardson says that her favorite part is the abundant natural light spilling in at the top and the edges. She quotes founding partner Stephen Kieran as saying, "Time happens in this space...The sun moves through the space and arcs through it, beginning with the east side with a beam that moves across the floor. It's truly a spiritual experience—that abundance of natural light—that's so absent from corporate office spaces."
The blog includes a video (after the jump) that offers a look inside the workspace and commentary from employees.
