HOK's William Valentine, FAIA: 'I'm on to less'

Bill Valentine joined Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum (#1 on BD&C's Giants 300 list of A/E firms for 2005) shortly after earning his MArch from Harvard 43 years ago. He became president of the 1,885-employee, St. Louis-based firm in 2000 and was named chairman a few months ago.

Valentine is considered one of the pioneers of the green-building movement, and one of its staunchest advocates. As design leader, he operates out of the firm's San Francisco office, one of 23 HOK offices in North and South America, Asia, and Europe.

Projects bearing his design imprimatur include the Biogen Idec R&D Campus, San Diego; the University of California, Irvine, Natural Science Building; Nortel Campus, Ottawa, Ont.; Apple Computer R&D Center, Cupertino, Calif.; King Khaled International Airport, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; and San Francisco's Moscone Convention Center and Levi's Plaza.

Robert Cassidy: You're very concerned about the amount of consumption in this country compared to other parts of the world.

William Valentine: I think our use habits in the U.S. are deplorable. We can definitely have smaller buildings and have them do with less. Talk about client concerns, one of them is 99.9999% universal—they all have budget problems, because construction costs are both out of sight and erratic. If we put our emphasis on how our buildings could be really efficient, we could do a lot of smaller things. Smaller buildings use less brick, less steel, less cooling, and in the long run less land.

So I'm really on to less. My take on this is that it's fairly good business, and the client wants to see how it can be done.

Less is the basic building block of sustainability. We're using up a quarter of the world's resources and we're only 3% of the world's population. In central Africa, the women spend more than half their time getting water for their families, and we take all of that for granted.

RC: Can you really sell the idea of simpler, smaller buildings?

WV: Yes. We have a new project that is smaller, an office building in Salinas, Calif., for Monterey County. It just opened last month. It was programmed at 150,000 sf, and we built it at 135,000. We had a bet that we could get every function that they wanted into the smaller space. We never took anything out of it, and they're very happy with it. I think this concept will absolutely sell to corporations, to have really good workplaces, with dining facilities and fitness centers and conference centers, and still be smaller.

RC: "Architecture for the common man"—you got that idea from HOK founder Gyo Obata. What does that mean to you?

WV: It's things that enrich every man's designs. Better schools, better hospitals. This idea of actually making a better environment is much more important than trying to make each building a monument. There can just be way too many monuments. I'm after designing things that can be really helpful. We're reportedly the richest country in the world, and yet we have really crappy public schools, deteriorating infrastructure, healthcare not reaching so many people—this is going to come back at us. I think there's a role for architects to do something useful.

RC: HOK is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and you're donating $500,000 to a tuberculosis clinic in Kenya. [The funds will go to construction upgrades, outfitting, staffing, and solar-power equipment for the 24-building Mbirikani Clinic diagnostic and treatment center in southeastern rural Kenya.] How did that come about?

WV: It started with our goal at HOK to enrich people's lives. Rather than pop a bunch of champagne corks, we decided to do one helpful project, something that we could absolutely get done. And since we are a global company, we wanted it to be someplace where we are not located, so as not to be parochial. We soon settled on Africa, as the place with the most need in the world. Ironically, Africa has come to the forefront in recent times, but we started this last year.

We wanted to do something that we alone would do, not with our construction buddies or consultants. We narrowed it down to this clinic in Kenya. They don't have x-ray equipment, but they have lots of TB and broken bones. They've got a problem with power and they have plenty of sun, so that's why the solar equipment. We're not going to do any of the work ourselves—there's an indigenous group that's already designed the existing facilities. The diagnostic clinic will be open before end of the year.