Week 7

Over the duration of my internship, we have had a series of coffee talks open to the interns and the intern committee. We have even had the opportunity to speak with many thought leaders and design leaders. I think this is one of my favorite parts about HOK. High level people taking time to talk and invest in the lowly interns, truly the mark of caring corporation that is invested in it's people.

This past week, we had the opportunity to sit down with founding partner, Gyo Obata, the "O" in HOK. He told of us about his recent travels in Italy and asked us about our interests. Gyo is world reknowed designer and architect. Some of his more recognizable buildings are Lambert Airport, The Air and Space Museum in DC(1976), the Church of Christ Headquarters, and many others, along with his most well-known, the Priory Chapel, which is just a beautiful example of a modern plan worship space. Gyo is a very bright and charming man, and we all felt honored to chat with him so candidly.

Gyo Obata in front of Lambert Airport

Along with my usual tasks, ordering finishes, assisting with rendering, and space planning, I had the opportunity to work with the structures group. Our structural engineers are awesome. My point person with the group is Sal Gimbert. I have gotten to know Sal over the past 2 months. She is incredibly passionate about non-profit work. So she and I share a common bond here. Last weekend, we helped serve local non-profit together. During this time, she mentioned getting involved with structures, and I hopped on board instantly.Sal is awesome as she talks about our Project Haiti below. Also, she's Australian and is the coolest, brightest person around.

Getting to see building from such a functional and pragmatic point of view has taught me a lot. The engineers truly do make the building and a close relationship with your engineers=a more easily attainable design vision. With the structures team, I was able to help with a deadline they have for an existing building project. I was digging through structural drawings, all done by hand 60 years ago, to determine some existing openings and beam configurations which I then recreated in Revit. 

The staff and client relations are managed by the project manager at HOK. The project manager is always the lead on this. You can always tell a project manager at HOK by whether or not they are on the phone. These individuals have been in the field for a long time and know how to manage very professional AND relational interactions with the client. They are always smiling and upbeat in any client scenario with the attitude of "we can get this done." We are trying to get better about managing projects after construction. However, the projects are often too large to manage well in a way that is cost-effective. I have been told by many designers that you learn during the construction process while you can still fix any issues. After project completion when you walk through, these lessons are a bit more difficult but happen more often. HOK sets standards for work places, so these changes within the workspace are easy and require little effort. However, HOK is always happy to work with an old client. Many of our clients are repeat clients, as well as our large corporate accounts. The workplace studies assesments and any program assesments our done by our strategic planning people. They have very detailed technology and software to do a workspace utilization studies, which are actually helping with right now for our client, BJC. Client type is mostly corporate. However, within the HOK office, we have a labs planning group and healthcare goup. So these are common markets as well. Clients almost always look like a large corporate client with a board or a panel or maybe just one point person for a certain project. The approval time frame is much longer the farther up the chain you have to go for this type of client.