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Format: 2024-03
Format: 2024-03
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Knox College Whitcomb Art Center Awarded AIA COTE Top Ten Award

April 2022

We are honored the Knox College Whitcomb Art Center has been recognized with a 2022 AIA Committee on 
the Environment (COTE) Top Ten Award
. The AIA COTE Top Ten Awards recognize ten innovative projects each year for their integration of design excellence with environmental performance. Lake|Flato leads the industry with 14 COTE Top Ten Awards, demonstrating our commitment to design performance & sustainability.

 

The Whitcomb Art Center creates a new home for the Knox College art program and serves as a civic bridging agent welcoming in and melding together the diverse cultural identities of the neighborhoods and districts surrounding the site: Knox’s traditional academic campus, Galesburg’s central business core, and the adjacent industrial warehouse district. The facility integrates the studio art and art history departments of Knox College in a new, light-filled, cost-effective, modern building anchored by a landscaped event and work courtyard. Inside, a series of double height studios, galleries, and critique spaces foster a vibrant interdisciplinary art community and program. 

 

With an extremely lean project budget, the Whitcomb Art Center reflects the self-described scrappy and unconventional community of Knox’s art department. Within this lean mindset every design decision contributes to multiple performance goals in a highly integrated way. The building is a high-performing workhorse shaped for efficient daylight capture and made of simple industrial materials assembled in surprising and elegant ways.

 

"This is a traditional form re-imagined in a unique and refreshing way. By using economical steel frame and reusing finishes, they made something special, taking a brown field and restoring the natural ecology, done beautifully. ”

- 2022 COTE Top Ten Award Jury 

 

Upon completion, the Whitcomb Art Center received LEED Gold certification. With the new facility up and running, art department chair Mark Holmes summarizes his department’s collective sense of success with the project and what the design team set out to do:

 

"A year or so into its life, the building has a palpable effect on students and faculty alike. For one thing, everyone loves to be there  we all spend more time helping or talking informally with students and just indulging our interest in the light, space, and shapes. The amount of daylight is a huge benefit."

 

Congratulations to the 2022 COTE Top Ten honorees! To see all 2022 AIA COTE Top Ten projects, click here.

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Grand Opening: U.S. Federal Courthouse in San Antonio

April 2022

Dedicated on April 20th, the San Antonio Federal Courthouse creates a dignified civic presence that celebrates San Antonio’s history and culture. The design team worked with the City of San Antonio, the General Services Administration (GSA), and several other Federal Agencies over twelve years to design a GSA Design Excellence project that represents the civic importance of a new federal courthouse while capturing the cultural identity of San Antonio. Delivering one of the nation’s most economically designed federal courthouses involved balancing the art of architecture with the science of high performance design. Currently on track to achieve LEED Gold certification, the Courthouse provides a compact footprint with light-filled courtrooms, workplaces, and a multi-purpose public atrium which maximize daylight for the benefit of building users. Energy-efficient and resource-conserving strategies reduce energy costs by 21% and provide an indoor water savings of 30%.

 

“In our built environment,” shares Lead Designer David Lake, “courthouses remain that rare example of an iconic symbol for justice and integrity housed in a uniquely ordered architectural presence. In this courthouse, the design team crafted a courthouse whose clarity of purpose and permanence were strengthened by the presence of light.”

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2022 WoodWorks Wood Design Awards

April 2022

Informed by our ethos of designing in partnership with the land, Lake|Flato’s commitment to mass timber construction is a carbon-fighting strategy that celebrates the timeless qualities of beauty, nature, and craft. Three Lake|Flato projects — Hotel Magdalena in Austin, Texas, the University of Denver Burwell Center for Career Achievement in Denver, Colorado, and The Soto in San Antonio, Texas— are recipients of WoodWorks’ 2022 U.S. Wood Design Awards, which will be honored at the International Mass Timber Conference occurring this spring in Portland. These projects showcase the natural warmth and resiliency of wood while honoring the unique history and context of each site. To learn more about the 2022 WoodWorks Wood Design Award recipients, click here

 

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House Zero Opens Its Doors to Future of 3D Printed Housing

March 2022

LakeFlato and ICON, one of the nation’s leaders in advanced construction technologies, have unveiled House Zero, the first large-scale house completed as part of ICON's new Exploration Series of 3D-printed homes. 

Lake|Flato collaborated intensely with ICON’s software developers, robotics engineers and material scientists to create a new set of architectural strategies for printed concrete construction. In addition to demonstrating the benefits of 3D construction as an innovative building technology, House Zero is also a compelling and climate-responsive home connecting its inhabitants to a native Texas landscape in Austin’s urban context. Built for permanence and resilience, the house’s flexible plan supports ever-evolving patterns of living and aging-in-place that a family experiences over the course of a lifetime. 

“This welcoming, practical home design expands the performance capabilities of 3D printing technology and is unlike any other home we’ve designed to date,” shares Ashley Heeren, an Associate at Lake|Flato. “Designed for net-zero energy and to push the limit of additive manufacturing, House Zero also responds to the climate gracefully, celebrates materials and an innovative assembly process, and uses simple moves to accomplish many things at once,” states Lewis McNeel, an Associate Partner at Lake|Flato.

Tours of House Zero will be available during SXSW on March 13-14, 2022 from 9am to 6pm. Sign up today!

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Respecting the Land: Lake|Flato Spring Events and Book Readings

March 2022

This spring, we eagerly await opportunities to share our place-based, sustainable ethos articulated in our latest book Lake|Flato Houses: Respecting the Land. From a digital open house with the Architectural League on March 4th to book talks in Texas in May and in New York in June, we look forward to connecting about design, architecture, and strategies for partnering with the land to create buildings that are tactile and modern, environmentally responsible and authentic, artful and crafted. 

 

Click the links to read more about each event. 

 

March 2022 

 

May 2022 

 

June 2022 

 

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Marine Education Center Receives 2022 AIA Honor Award for Architecture 

February 2022

The Marine Education Center at the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Coast Research Laboratory is a recipient of a prestigious 2022 AIA Honor Award for Architecture. The award celebrates the best contemporary architecture that demonstrates excellence in design, sustainability, sense of place and purpose, highlighting how buildings and spaces can improve our lives. Designed to protect the ecological integrity of its hurricane-prone site, the Marine Education Center’s architecture highlights coastal building techniques that harmonize with the surrounding marine environment in ways that are resilient, sustainable, and durable. 

 

Steeped in its unique coastal setting, the Center supports a career-based working environment that relies on a blend of formal, informal, and free-choice thinking and higher education strategies that focus on the north-central Gulf of Mexico’s coastal ecosystems. Promoting careers in marine sciences and fostering community involvement, the center’s campus is a place to study and research environmental education and coastal resilience.  

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Available Now – Lake|Flato Houses: Respecting the Land

December 2021

We are thrilled to announce the release of our book Lake|Flato Houses: Respecting the Land published by Rizzoli.

While our firm has grown considerably over the past four decades, our original desire to build in partnership with the land has not wavered. We consider the desire to create projects that are rooted in their particular places and that respond to their natural environments not only meaningful, but also increasingly resonant and relevant. This ethos is perhaps most clearly conveyed in our houses – the firm’s first projects – which meld architecture and landscape in ways that continue to endure and evolve.

Houses are among the most intimate spaces we design, and the projects in this book range from ranches in Texas and Wyoming to family homes in upstate New York. Focusing on 16 houses built between 2014 and 2020, the book demonstrates an approach to residential design that begins with the land.

Available now 

Published by Rizzoli
Foreword by Ed Mazria
Introduction & essays by Lake|Flato
Project texts by Helen Thompson
Edited by Oscar Riera Ojeda
Graphic design by Denise De Leon & Lucia B. Bauza

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TxA Conference and Design Expo

October 2021

This year's 82nd annual Texas Society of Architects Conference and Expo is occuring in San Antonio from October 7-9! Please see below for opportunities to learn about our projects and people that will be featured as part of the conference. 

 

Carraro Residence Tour - October 9, 11:30 - 1:30 p.m. 

We are honored the Carraro Residence has been recognized with the 25 Year Award. The Carraro Residence has stood the test of time: first as a private home and now as a destination for guests and events. Contributing to an identifiable Texas design vocabulary, the project is one of the earliest representations of Lake|Flato's ethos of stewarding the land and repurposing local materials in inventive ways. Click here to read more.

 

Young Professsional Achievement Award: Sophia Razzaque 

Sophia Razzaque, AIA, NOMA, IIDA, LEED AP, is the recipient of TxA's Award for Young Professional Achievement. An Associate at Lake|Flato's Austin Development studio, Sophia's contributions to the design profession are numerous and diverse - spanning advocacy of social equity and EDI initiatives to numerous lectures, publications, and industry leadership contributions. Click here to read more.

 

TxA Design Award: New Mexico School for the Arts

NMSA is one of only 15 projects to receive a 2021 TxA Design Award. The project repurposes over a dozen different buildings built across 140 years into an inspirational campus for the nation's only public boarding school for the arts. (Completed in collaboration with Studio Southwest Architects.) Click here to read more. 

 

Say It Loud - Women in Architecture Exhibit

We are thrilled Adrianna Swindle, Ashley Heeren, Kerry Phillips, Laura Kaupp Jensen, Sophia Razzaque, Tenna Florian and Vicki Yuan from Lake|Flato will be featured in this year's Women in Architecture "Say it Loud" exhibit. The exhibit will be showcased in Tower View lobby, located directly below the Hemisfair Ballroom. For more details, click here.

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AIA Austin Design Excellence Conference

August 2021

We're thrilled to be participating in severla panels during this year's AIA Austin Design Excellence Conference! To register, click here. Please join us for the following sessions: 

 

Hotel Magdalena: Legacy of Site, Mass Timber, and Culture – Thursday 8/19 | 1:15-2:25

Panelists: Sophia Razzaque (Lake|Flato), Melina Phillips (Lake|Flato), Chrisine Skaglund (Ten Eyck) & Erik Warkentin (StructureCraft)

Hotel Magdalena opened in the Fall of 2020 as the largest ground up property operated by Bunkhouse. It is also the first mass timber hotel in North America. Join us for a panel discussion from Lake|Flato Architects, Ten Eyck Landscape Architects, and StructureCraft Builders to learn about the transformation of the site of the old Terrace Motor Hotel into Hotel Magdalena in the Heart of Austin’s South Congress District. The design, which was heavily influenced by Lake Flato’s ethos of aligning building performance goals with connecting to the outdoors, has also allowed this hotel to open during the pandemic.

 

The Holdsworth Center: A Sustainable Leadership Campus for Texas Public Education – Thursday 8/19 | 2:25-3:35

Panelists: Justin Garrison (Lake|Flato), Chris Krajcer (Lake|Flato), JP Casillas (Ten Eyck), Pauline Dow (Holdsworth)

The Holdsworth Center’s Campus on Lake Austin is a first-of-its kind facility for Texas’ public school districts designed to grow the skill, ingenuity and effectiveness of the professionals who educate the state’s 5.5 million students. It was built as a gift for hardworking educators who deserve world-class professional development opportunities that rival what CEOs and business executives experience. This session will consider how the mission of The Holdsworth Center grew to support an integrated approach to campus design that inspires environmental and communal thriving. In addition to sharing the history of the project’s realization, panelists will discuss how the campus planning, architectural and landscape design, and construction strategies came together to create a sustainable campus for transformative learning.

 

Integrating Research into Architectural Practice – Friday 8/20 | 10:40-12:15

Lake|Flato Panel: Ashley Grzywa, Anne Herndon, Kate Sector, Sam Rusek

Leveraging existing research, investigating new ideas, conducting post-occupancy evaluation and sharing lessons learned allows us to improve the design and performance of the built environment and promote occupant and environmental health. This course will offer tools for developing research strategies appropriate for your firm and workflow. Panelists will introduce a variety of research and partnership models by presenting examples that include postoccupancy evaluation of energy performance, literature reviews of existing urban greenway research and thermal comfort technology prototyping, among others. The session will discuss both process and application of findings to future projects, highlighting the importance of using research to inform professional practice.

 

Lessons from Post-Occupancy Energy Evaluation – Friday 8/20 | 1:15-2:25

Lake|Flato Panel: Kate Sector, Gus Starkey, Sam Rusek, Sunnie Diaz

Buildings operational energy makes up about 40% of the U.S.’s total energy usage and CO2 emissions. Post-occupancy energy monitoring and data collection is necessary for evaluating measurable energy performance, improving our designs, and creating future measurable goals to reduce our energy use and subsequent environmental impacts. Lake|Flato started its energy monitoring program in 2014. Since then, we have monitored 16 commercial and residential projects of a variety of scales. Lake|Flato has committed to sharing its progress through the 2030 commitment, which has the goal of achieving across the board net-zero operational energy portfolio by the year 2030. Through this process, we have learned a lot about our buildings, and building owners have saved thousands of dollars in energy costs. In this session we will introduce our energy monitoring process and major lessons learned regarding various energy categories such as HVAC, lighting, plug loads, and more. The session will follow with a panel of three case studies led by designers who will share their individual experience and lessons learned for a deeper dive into the post-occupancy evaluation process.

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Hotel Magdalena & The Witte Recognized with AIA Austin Design Awards

May 2021

We are honored two of our projects, Hotel Magdalena and The New Witte Museum, were recognized by AIA Austin with 2021 Design Awards! The AIA Austin Design Awards program recognizes outstanding architectural projects completed by AIA Austin members. This year's esteemed jurors included Lance Hosey, FAIA (Design Principal and Chief Impact Officer with HMC Architects); Jonathan Moody, AIA (President/CEO of Moody Nolan); Philip Ryan, AIA (founder and principal of StudioModh); and Ashley Schafer (Professor at the Knowlton School.) 

 

Jury Comment videos: 

 

 

To immerse yourself in a virtual tour of Hotel Magdalena, click here. Congratulations to all who were recognized - see the 2021 list of award recipients here