Gordon Stratford, director of design at the Toronto office, remembers that on the first day in the firm's new space, wave after wave of employees immediately began opening and closing the windows.

Those operable windows epitomize the relationship between sustainability and community manifested in this office renovation. Along with each work area's individual thermostat, the windows demanded a change in both space-sharing habits and design practice. "We needed to cooperate to make sure the space works," explains Nadia Orawski, an HOK designer and the office's unofficial sustainability expert.

In the two years since HOK moved in, the windows have helped staffers recognize the importance of the firm's own sustainability efforts as well as the environmental impact of their design work on the global and local communities. The results have been tangible: the new office has become a platform for education and community outreach.

"The HOK mantra has always been 'enriching people's lives,'" explains Stratford.

In the early 1990s the firm's executive committee formally designated sustainable design as one of its core values, but the first major project was the commission for a 1.2-million-square-foot Environmental Protection Agency research center, awarded in 1993—right when a critical mass of American architects began focusing on sustainability. (The U.S. Green Building Council was formed the same year.) In 2000 HOK published its growing body of internal research as the HOK Guidebook to Sustainable Design. The firm's commitment became institutionalized. "Our goal was that every project we touched had to have a sustainable-design aspect to it," Stratford says—beginning with their own offices.

Rather than advertise their design savvy with the typical architect's corporate cool—all Barcelona chairs and travertine—HOK throws its significant corporate heft behind the "triple bottom line": how sustainability benefits business, society, and the planet. What the firm has found is that the conversation often stretches beyond architecture. "We're talking with our clients about what it means to go green not just with their offices but with their whole organization," says Orawski. One client recently asked for help in offsetting the carbon dioxide emissions of its energy usage to make its space "carbon neutral," prompting Orawski to respond, "Oh boy, this is going to be fun!"

Source: "The Green Urban Office," Metropolis, January 2007, by Andrew Blum. Read the story.