The Design for Reuse Primer, a free e-publication project by Public Architecture, was recently released. In this comprehensive guide to repurposing materials directly from the waste stream, read about the reclaimed lumber and stone used at our LEED Platinum-rated Stewart Middle School at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, including lessons learned and material sources.

The Smithsonian Institution's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum announced the winners and finalists of the 2010 National Design Awards, which commend excellence across a variety of disciplines.  
 
The Architecture Design Award recognizes work in commercial, public, or residential architecture. The jury noted the firm's “integration of research with design, guided by a deep environmental ethic.” The award was presented at the White House on July 21, 2010.

The New London Embassy design competition exhibit officially opened today at the headquarters of the American Institute of Architects in Washington, D.C.

The exhibit celebrates the completion of the design competition to select the architect for the New London Embassy for the United States of America. Models and information boards from the final four competing architectural firms—KieranTimberlake, Morphosis Architects, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners and Richard Meier & Partners—will be on display, along with the model of the current London Embassy designed by Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen in the late 1950s.

Loblolly House was built in just six weeks in 2006, inaugurating a novel approach to building off site using integrated component assemblies that are factory-built and assembled together on site. We recently constructed a full-scale critical detail of Loblolly House in our Philadelphia shop, and it is currently on display at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum's National Design Triennial, Why Design Now? exhibition, on view from May 14-January 9, 2011.

In this video, Partners Stephen Kieran and James Timberlake, along with Project Architect Marilia Rodrigues, the Production Engineer, and others, discuss the ideas and methodologies behind Loblolly House, a sustainable residence fabricated off site yet fully integrated to its setting on the Chesapeake Bay.

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) and its Committee on the Environment (COTE) have announced that the Special NO 9 House, designed with New Orleans firm John C. Williams Architects as executive architect, has been named a Top Ten Green Project for 2010. The house is one of thirteen single-family homes designed by prominent architectural firms for Make It Right, an organization founded by actor Brad Pitt to provide storm-resistant, affordable, and sustainable housing for the residents of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward displaced by Hurricane Katrina. The COTE Top Ten Green Projects program, now in its fourteenth year, celebrates projects that are the result of a thoroughly integrated approach to architecture, natural systems, and technology.

On February 23, 2010, KieranTimberlake was selected from four finalists as the architecture firm to design the new U.S. embassy in London. In his remarks at the announcement, OBO Acting Director Adam Namm commented on the embassy's potential to be a “net exporter of energy” owing to the various processes in place to capture energy produced by building systems.

He also mentioned that the London competition was one of only four juried design competitions in history to build new U.S. embassies. More information can be found at the official embassy website.

With the Yale Sculpture Building and School of Art Gallery, the client aspired to LEED Silver performance only. The Platinum award (which is the highest level of LEED certification) in this case arose from the integrated process, not from exceptional expenditure for additive systems. For several months at the outset, the entire design team met with the client weekly. Options were assessed with all team members present as we developed the program, site orientation, massing, landscape, structure and curtainwall. The result is an artful building that thoroughly integrates performance with form and urbanism.

KieranTimberlake has been selected as part of an internationally experienced team (including Cooper Robertson & Partners, master planners; OLIN, landscape architects; and HR&A Advisors) to develop the Master Plan for the Central Delaware Waterfront in Philadelphia.

The transformation of Houghton Chapel and addition of a new Multifaith Center required an intense dialogue with both the past and future at Wellesley College.

Design From Dialogue: Houghton Chapel and Multifaith Center at Wellesley College 
by the Reverend Victor Kazanjian and Stephen Kieran, FAIA 
 
The renovation of Houghton Chapel and Multifaith Center at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, is a project profoundly rooted in dialogue: between architect and client, between historical and contemporary programs and spaces, and among the people of diverse cultures and religions who constitute the campus community. This dialogue moved the project beyond implementing preconceived notions of what a renovated chapel space might look like, and instead impelled us to create spaces within an historic structure that would welcome all and would invite the campus to experience the diversity of the human community. 
 
Prominent on college and university campuses across the country are buildings, often referred to simply as “the chapel,” that once reflected the religious component of the educational missions of these institutions. Originally home to daily gatherings for prayer and ethical instruction, mostly in the Protestant Christian tradition, these chapel buildings have seen diminished use in the past half-century as educational institutions have renounced their religious past and have embraced a secular context for their future. Chapels on many campuses are religious anachronisms and function mostly as additional meeting spaces for community gatherings and lectures, or as historical buildings offering a quaint stop on college tours or a venue for the occasional wedding or memorial service. Since the mid-1990s growing religious diversity on campuses, reflecting the changing demographics of American society and the internationalization of American colleges and universities, has caused a rethinking of the role of religious and spiritual life in higher education and has thus brought new focus on religious and spiritual spaces, leading to the development of multifaith chapels. 
 
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