KieranTimberlake's Industry-Changing, Life Cycle Assessment App Tally® Transferred to Open-Access Organization Building Transparency

Increasing availability of the powerful design tool to design professionals significantly limits the damaging effects of new building construction on the environment

In 2020, KieranTimberlake received awards recognizing the firm and its projects. Each of these awards recognizes how we balance analysis with intuition to create innovative architecture. We are proud of our team and grateful to our clients and collaborators for these achievements.  
 

KieranTimberlake landed on Fast Company Magazine's list of Most Innovative Companies of 2020. The annual round-up of thought leaders recognized architecture firms' progress in reducing embodied carbon in the industry. The KT Innovations app Roast , an occupant comfort survey app that lets architects and facilities managers create surveys, collect responses, and visualize data for green building accreditation, received a shout-out in the nomination:

8. KIERANTIMBERLAKE 
For figuring out where an office is cold or drafty with its Roast survey app, so issues can be fixed 
 
KieranTimberlake is a rare example of a midsize firm that has a thriving research and technology division. The company is deeply focused on connecting spaces and has developed its own software to measure things like energy usage to inform architecture. An architecture firm that acts more like a tech company.

OpenHome, a new system for constructing customizable prefab homes, was unveiled recently in Dwell magazine. Created in collaboration with Bensonwood, a builder of timber-frame houses and high-performance architectural components, OpenHome aims to strengthen ties between the architect and the builder, offering homebuyers an easier and faster design-build experience with higher quality construction.

KieranTimberlake's innovative, energy efficient studio was recently cited by Penelope Green in The New York Times article, “Do Americans Need Air-Conditioning?” Green's story comments on the paradox of overcooled spaces during the summer months, and highlights our passive cooling experiment in which we eschewed air-conditioning for the entire summer of 2015. Instead, we relied on fans, open windows, dehumidifiers, and a nighttime flushing system that exhausted hotter air that accumulated during the day and replaced it with cooler evening air. While we ultimately installed an air-conditioner the following summer, as Green notes, our studio is as “a model of energy efficiency” thanks to our mixed mode operation.  
 
Also mentioned in the article is Roast, a comfort survey app developed by our affiliate company KT Innovations. As its name implies, Roast was born from our building manager's efforts to keep the office comfortable during our 2015 summer experiment. The first iterations ultimately led to a relaxed dress code, flexible work hours that avoided the afternoon heat, and additional fans. Over time, the survey evolved to collect feedback not only on temperature and humidity, but also brightness, noise levels, smells, cleanliness, productivity, and more.  
 
The full article is available online at The New York Times.

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's work on Wellesley College's Pendleton West was recently featured in Architectural Record. Written by Beth Broome, the article heralds the renovation and 10,000-square-foot addition as a prominent and accessible new gateway to Wellesley's historic Academic Quad. Though surrounded by predominantly brick buildings, Broome calls out Pendleton's concrete facade as a way to “help the building assert itself as a portal through its distinctiveness while subtly nodding to the [neighboring Rudolph and Klauder-designed] buildings, with their recast and limestone copings and trims,” adding that the precast and cast-in-place concrete panels “give the exterior a rich tactility.” 
 
To read the full article, click here.

The US Embassy in London was recently featured on the art and design website Artsy. Listed alongside such striking works as the Ghana National Museum of Slavery and Rio de Janeiro's Museum of Image and Sound, the embassy was named cited as one of the buildings that will “define architecture in 2017.” Writer Anna Kats praises the embassy's unique and transparent polymer-clad cube exterior that “rejects the fortress-like designs of so many other American embassies,” noting that this design results in a building that “interacts with and is semipermeable to the densely populated surrounding neighborhood while maintaining the necessary standards of high security.” 
 
To read the full article, click here. 

This past December, a new documentary examining the work of late architectural legend Eero Saarinen aired in the American Masters series on PBS. KieranTimberlake was proud to sponsor the production of this exciting film. Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future examines some of Saarinen's most iconic work, including the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the TWA Terminal in New York City, and the David S. Ingalls Rink in New Haven. Having completed the renovation and expansion of Morse and Ezra Stiles Colleges which were among Saarinen's last works, KieranTimberlake is doubly inspired by this film.  
 
To watch the trailer or the entire feature film, click here.

A story about KieranTimberlake's design for a new multi-use building for New York University recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal's real estate section. In the piece, “NYU Expansion Aims to Make School More Inclusive,” reporter Josh Barbanel describes the design for 181 Mercer, a new 735,000-square-foot building that was unveiled to the University community on December 8, 2016. He outlines the history of the site and how the building meets NYU's mission, highlighting the ways in which the building ties itself to the surrounding community. In addition to a glass facade that visually links the building and neighborhood, 181 Mercer's footprint was shifted in order to create a landscaped pedestrian walkway through the block, bringing connectivity and life to a previously dark and gloomy landscape.  
 
To read the full article, click here.