The Chickasaw Nation Medical Center connects with nature to provide a nurturing healthcare environment for Native Americans living in southeastern Oklahoma.  The architecture maximizes access and views to the pristine, 230-acre site while inviting daylight into the buildings.  Patient units are directly oriented to the creek and trees, with traditional hospital “front” and “back” elements tucked to the side.  Chickasaw art and culture, which emphasizes giving and sharing with extended family, influences the massing and building forms.  A large “Town Center” gathering space is at the heart of the facility, adjacent to food services. Faceted facades and terrazzo floor patterns echo traditional Chickasaw neckwear.  Oklahoma stone and unfinished copper panels are among the natural building materials assembled to take on an organized yet organic aspect.  The medical center encompasses a 216,000 square foot hospital and a 142,000 square foot clinic.

The FBI’s recently opened 275,000-square-foot field office integrates concerns for security, sustainability, and appropriate image into a thoroughly synthesized design solution. A lightweight metal frame is hung from powerful concrete walls to carry a “second skin” for the building. Heavily fritted, laminated glass attaches to the lightweight frame with stainless steel clips. The almost opaque glass, placed away from the actual thermal wall of the building, shades the structure substantially from direct heat gain. The space between the two skins becomes a significantly cooled microclimate, reducing the load requirements for air conditioning systems. Apertures in the glass skin, sized somewhat smaller than the actual windows, are carefully placed to provide excellent day-lighting with reduced glare for interior work spaces. Concrete walls are sheathed in heat-reflecting aluminum shingles, allowing the concrete’s high thermal mass to benefit the temperature and stability of the structure. Larry Speck was lead designer for the project, a joint venture between PageSoutherlandPage and Leo A Daly/LAN.

Site characteristics and the desire to create an unusual merger of landscape and living drive the design of Waterstone, a collection of 71 condominiums on Lake Travis.  Replacing a subdivision originally planned for low-density, single-family homes, the development inhabits the landscape with minimum intrusiveness while offering the privacy and convenience of single-family homes.  The structures are strung along a single contour to minimize cut and fill and the disruption of plant material. Parking and roads are tightly clustered around the units to maintain the sense of being in a natural environment.  The units face strongly to spectacular views and ideal natural light conditions; large, shaded patios connect inhabitants with the outdoors.  Materials and colors, including local fieldstone, help the buildings merge gracefully with the site and reflect the character of Central Texas.

Master planning East Avenue, a 23-acre, mixed-use development, involved more than 80 meetings with stakeholders over the course of a year.  The site, an ideal location for increasing density near Austin’s urban core, became available when a small college relocated.  The East Avenue community will re-inhabit the site with moderate-income rental housing, condominiums, retail, medical offices, a boutique hotel, entertainment facilities, an urban park and a plaza.  The neighborhood will center on a lively, pedestrian-oriented street lined with retail.  Two public open spaces, both located to preserve mature existing trees, will punctuate the street. Sustainable design features will include continuous bioswales to treat  storm water, more than two acres of green roofs, and an efficient central energy plant to provide steam and chilled water for the whole project.  PageSoutherlandPage is designing several buildings within the development, the first of which completed construction in fall 2009.

Discovery Green returns 12 acres of mostly paved lots to a natural green space in the heart of downtown Houston. A core of outdoor activity near the convention center, ballpark and arena, the park also provides a central focus for new development. Larry Speck led the design of the park’s architecture, creating a model of sustainability. Two restaurants and a park administration building feature deep porches and roofs that pitch to the north, providing shade and balanced daylight and drawing warm air up and out. Optimal solar orientation, green roofs, photovoltaic arrays and the use of local and renewable materials further contribute to the project’s Gold LEED certification. Hargreaves Associates Landscape Architects designed Discovery Green led the park design in association with PageSoutherlandPage. Other architectural elements include an underground garage for 600 vehicles, a bandstand, a children’s performance space and various shade structures.

The Grove is set prominently within Discovery Green park, Houston’s new 12-acre urban oasis.  The restaurant architecture takes inspiration from a magnificent, double row of live oak trees that have long inhabited the site.  Indoor and outdoor dining spaces are strung long and thin, just to the south of the oak alley.  Each room has a slightly different vista into the tree canopy, through huge expanses of glass that also admit soft north light.  Broken into a series of smaller parts defined by function, the building complements the natural surroundings with its scale, texture, and material palette.  An intensely colorful, commissioned artwork by Austin artist Margo Sawyer provides the one burst of color.  The Grove is certified LEED Gold for its innovative, sustainable design, together with the park and all of its architecture.

AMLI’s first urban high-rise is a vital force in downtown Austin’s rapidly developing 2nd Street Retail District. The 18-story, three-star-green building integrates 17 floors of apartments, 35,000 square feet of ground level retail, a spacious amenity deck and 4 1/2 levels of above-ground parking. The building image is contemporary, clean, and responsive to its urban context. Anodized aluminum shingles articulate the different building volumes, and a distinctive staggered window pattern breaks down the scale once again. The garage is draped with a lightweight steel and polycarbonate armature that screens cars from view while diminishing the structure’s mass. The tower is designed to high sustainability standards using optimal massing, extensive sunshading, and an innovative “rainscreen” wall assembly.

The Alpine Federal Courthouse is a simple, solid response to the extraordinary qualities of the local Texas landscape, the West Texas climate and the specific mission of its occupants. The powerful Trans-Pecos terrain dominates the experience of this locale. The building’s materials―primarily russet-colored, dry-stacked West Texas sandstone―link the building to the larger landscape as well as providing high thermal mass appropriate for a climate with a high diurnal swing. Primary departments in the courthouse have a distinct “front door” on the open, covered walkway surrounding the central courtyard―a device that is useful in accomplishing climate control as well as security goals.

The expansion of the Christ Church Cathedral campus solidifies the congregation’s vision as the “church for downtown” while responding to its neighborhood. Four diverse program elements are carefully arranged on a full city block adjacent to the historic sanctuary. Central offices for the the Bishop and Diocese occupy an elegant, glass, two-story building enclosed in wood trellises. A quarter-block park creates a significant open space on prominent Texas Avenue. A 350-car parking facility integrates into a downtown area poorly served by garages. And, perhaps most fundamentally, the project establishes a home for the Cathedral’s expanding outreach programs, including critically needed facilities for the homeless. The new campus creates strong street spaces and well defined zones for a complex range of activities. Local materials, extensive sun shading and daylighting contribute to a strong sustainability program. Larry Speck led the project’s design within the Leo A Daly/LAN + PageSoutherlandPage Joint Venture.