News

We recently celebrated the grand opening of Trinity University’s Dicke Hall, the first mass timber higher education building in San Antonio. Combining beauty and design performance with a unique structural system, Dicke Hall reduces the building’s impact on the environment while expressing the university’s forward-looking commitment to innovation in liberal arts education and environmental stewardship. The craft of the building’s mass timber structure pays homage to the campus’s mid-century modern design heritage, extending Trinity’s tradition of sustainable building into the 21st century by incorporating the latest green solutions, sustainability practices, and construction methods.

Dicke Hall’s sustainability features include a combination of passive and active system strategies that, based on projected data, will result in an estimated 90% energy savings over baseline expectations for a building of this type. By using mass timber, Dicke Hall reduces greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption while modeling responsible stewardship of the environment. The carbon sequestered by Dicke Hall’s mass timber structure is equivalent to 374 acres of U.S. forest land for one year. 98% of regularly occupied spaces have access to daylight and views to the outdoors, creating a vibrant, productive environment for Trinity’s home for the humanities

We were honored to be a part of the Trinity University Dicke Hall team with Turner South Texas, Rialto Studio, Integral Group, DCI Engineers, Intelligent Engineering Services, Datum Engineers, Martin/Martin, Inc., Design Think Consulting and Studio Lumina. 

We are excited to announce our firm’s 2022 promotions, including five new Partners and three Associate Partners. Our growing next generation of leaders will continue to carry out Lake|Flato’s commitment to thoughtful architecture that responds to both human and environmental needs. Please join us in congratulating our staff for their passionate commitment to design excellence!

Partners 

Adrianna Swindle, AIA, IIDA, LEED AP BD+C 

Chris Krajcer, AIA, NCARB 

Joseph Benjamin, AIA, LEED AP BD+C 

Matt Wallace, AIA, LEED AP BD+C 

Todd Wascher, AIA, LEED AP BD+C 

Associate Partners 

Graham Beach, AIA 

Laura Kaupp Jensen, AIA 

Chief of Operations 

Scott Lelieur, AIA 

Project Architects 

Jenna Steinbeck, AIA, IIDA 

Melina Phillips, AIA, LEED AP 

Sunnie Diaz, AIA, LEED AP 

Project Directors 

Cameron Goldsmith 

Casey Nelson, AIA, LEED AP BD+C

Dan Carter, AIA, LEED AP BD+C 

James Thoreen, Associate AIA, LEED AP BD+C 

John Taylor Schaffhauser, AIA, LEED AP BD+C 

Nyssa Sherazee, AIA, LEED AP BD+C 

Sam Xu, AIA 

Project Designers 

Catherine St-Pierre 

Darby Prendergast, AIA, NCARB, WELL AP 

Joseph Mills, AIA 

Lindsay Belliveau 

Sameer Rayyan, LEED AP BD+C 

Marketing Manager 

Lyanne Guarecuco 

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.

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.