Customer Showcase

Global architectural firm HOK is leading the way toward sustainable communities.

Global architectural firm HOK specializes in planning, design and delivery solutions for buildings and communities. Through its collaborative network of 29 offices worldwide, the firm is committed to helping lead the world toward sustainable communities and building environments.

The firm has long used the Revit platform for building information modeling (BIM) for its sustainable design efforts and increasingly to support their efforts to incorporate biomimicry in their projects.

“Biomimicry is about understanding how nature works and applying it to design,” says Mary Ann Lazarus, HOK sustainable design director. “Revit helps us understand the implications of our designs for factors like energy usage, water usage, material usage, and shade coefficient. That knowledge will be directly applicable in developing biomimetic solutions.”

HOK has had the opportunity to put biomimicry to work in one of its current projects, a hillside community development near Pune, India, 80 miles southeast of Mumbai. Soil stability represents one of the biggest challenges of building in this location, due to the steep hillsides and the extreme weather conditions, which alternate between drought and monsoon.

Rather than drilling piers into the ground to secure buildings into the soil, the team is exploring a more biomimetic approach that uses foundations that mimic a tree’s roots. Additionally, HOK is taking a cue from nature in designing roofs that not only shed water effectively during monsoon season, but also collect and store the water to make it available during drought season—much as a native tree from that environment might do.

“The end result will be a community that functions much more harmoniously with nature and much more sustainably,” says Lazarus. “Revit’s a critical part of the toolkit for creating and analyzing designs that support the biomimicry vision.”