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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Who says you can't build a house in a day? A time-lapse video from the Orange County Register documents the Newport Beach, CA, installation of the KTLH 1.5 house we designed for LivingHomes.  
 
In a matter of a few hours, four off-site fabricated wood and steel modules comprising the 2,500 square-foot, two-story residence were precision-craned onto the site. The homeowners expect to move into their new house a month after install, meaning the entire process from laying the foundation to final finishes comprises less than four months—a half to a third of the time it takes to build a home with conventional methods. 
 
The home was constructed in a factory in Southern California. Before its permanent installation in Newport Beach, the house was exhibited in 2009 at the International Builders Show in Las Vegas, NV, and the TED Conference in Long Beach, CA. It is poised to become Orange County's first LEED-Platinum Certified Home. 
 
Keep reading: 
Los Angeles Times, Prefab housing goes green in Newport Beach 
CBS2, Newport Beach ‘Green' Home To Be Built In 1 Day

In the spring of 2008, we began design for Brockman Hall for Physics at Rice University in Houston, Texas. This 110,000 square-foot facility will house research, teaching, and office space for the Departments of Physics & Astronomy and Electrical & Computer Engineering. Nestled between existing buildings in the dense Science Quad, the building envelope respects the scale of the historic masonry vocabulary of the campus while extending it into a twenty-first century model for architecture and research at Rice.

In Bosch Rexroth's lean manufacturing podcast, James Timberlake discusses how aluminum structural framing, commonly used in factory applications, was used to build Cellophane House™. 
 

“We aimed to create a mass customizable system of building, not just a one-off. We wanted to show how a lean manufacturing approach could bring optimal benefits to home building,” said Timberlake.

 
“Cellophane House™ Part I and II” is episode 9 in Rexroth's lean manufacturing podcast series, available for listening or free download from the company's website. The podcast series is also available on iTunes and other podcast directories online. 

Cellophane House™ was recently featured on Big Ideas for a Small Planet, Season 3, Episode 5. 
 
An award-winning original documentary series from the Sundance Channel, this episode of the show asks the question, “Can we imagine architecture built on sustainability?”

This episode features interviews with forward-thinking designers, including Michael Manfredi and Marion Weiss of Weiss/Manfredi Architects, Reed Kroloff from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Rocio Romero, and our own James Timberlake and Stephen Kieran. 
 
Go to iTunes to download the full episode.