ING Direct is making as big an impact on Wilmington as it is on the global financial services industry, while keeping in mind its Dutch origins.
ING Direct believes “saving money should be as simple as having a cup of coffee,” so it has created a number of cafés around the nation where people can come [...]
News
ING Cafe – Virtual World
Brookdale Community College Begins Ten-Year Campus Renewal
Brookdale Community College operates its long-established main campus at Lincroft, New Jersey, along with the Western Monmouth campus in Freehold and five other facilities in Monmouth County, including Wall, Northern Monmouth, Eastern Monmouth, Long Branch and Sandy Hook Higher Education Center. Additionally, Brookdale leads the Communiversity, an alliance of six New Jersey colleges offering post-associate [...]
H2L2 Travels to Brazil for Graded Master Plan
Graded, The American School of São Paulo, one of the largest private schools in South America, is updating its master plan in celebration of its 90th Anniversary. Presently, the campus has an enrollment of 1200 students on approximately 7 hectares of land. In late 2010, H2L2 began to develop a new master plan that responds [...]
International School of Lausanne Enrollment Flourishes
H2L2 is currently developing a Master Plan for ISL in order to prepare for an expanded enrollment of 50%. The school is located in a pastoral residential area of Lausanne and currently has an enrollment of 630 students. Though the existing campus was built only five years ago, the rapid regional growth has increased the [...]
New Athletic Facilities for the Bucknell Bison
The West Campus Athletic Field Development began with the master plan several years ago. Since then, it has expanded and evolved into a significant sports complex that includes a variety of synthetic and natural turf fields, tennis courts, grandstands and parking. The most notable structures in the complex include the Indoor Sports, Recreation, and Wellness [...]
Campus Center Metamorphosis at the International School of Kenya
One of the finest international schools in the world, the International School of Kenya sits in a beautiful 50 acre, park-like campus. The very pleasant blending of traditional and modern architecture in a rich tropical landscape is a stimulating setting for the students who come from 74 countries. Responding to enrollment demands and the need [...]
H2L2 Celebrates Ten Years of Joint Success with the ACE Mentor Program
H2L2 recently celebrated 10 years of involvement with ACE and H2L2’s 100th ACE event by hosting an enthusiastic discussion of bridge structures and building design, accompanied by a few well-appreciated slices of pizza. “It’s truly one of the most rewarding parts of my career” explains H2L2 design architect Joanne Pizzo, AIA, who along with co-team [...]
Design is Key to Vital Florida Bridge
The Flagler Memorial Bridge is one of three bridges that connect the Town of Palm Beach to Florida’s mainland and the City of West Palm Beach. The other two bridges are the Royal Park Bridge, which was also designed by H2L2, and the Southern Boulevard Bridge which are located 0.8 miles and 2.9 miles, respectively, [...]
Global Commons in Princeton
Seeking to create a one-of-a-kind living and learning environment, The Hun School of Princeton selected H2L2 for its new Global Commons & Resident Life Building following a nationwide search. An inventive mixed-use building situated on Hun’s historic Mall, the Commons boasts a student life center, classrooms, and bookstore adjacent to an upscale tech-café with spacious [...]
Construction Today Magazine Awards H2L2 with Outstanding Achievement for Blank Rome LLP Conference Center
Construction Today Magazine has awarded H2L2’s architecture and interior design for Blank Rome LLP’s Conference Center 10th and 11th Floors in Philadelphia, PA as one of the Best Commercial Projects under $15 million dollars in their Fall 2010 issue. This is the 14th Annual Construction Excellence Awards issue for Construction Today Magazine, and H2L2’s first [...]
South Street Bridge reopens one month ahead of schedule and on-budget
From Mayor Nutter’s Office of Communications:
Mayor Michael A. Nutter announced today the reopening of the South Street
Bridge to all traffic. The Mayor was joined at a ribbon-cutting ceremony by City, State and Federal government officials as well as community leaders to celebrate the major infrastructure development. The $67 million reconstruction project began on December 8, [...]
H2L2’s Foundation Hall Design for Wagner College Wins 2 Awards
Foundation Hall, Wagner College’s newest on-campus residence, received an Excellence Award for Exterior and Natural Beauty and an Achievement Award for Interior and Interior Decorating in the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce 49th Annual Building Awards Program.
The awards will be presented at a special luncheon, to be held on December 3, 2010 at the Hilton Garden [...]
Thomas Piotrowski, Principal, earns Honorary Medal from Wroclaw University of Technology
Thomas Piotrowski, Principal at H2L2 Architects/Planners was recently awarded an honorary medal from Wroclaw University of Technology in Wroclaw, Poland. The official presentation of the medal will be held on the day of Holy Doctrine of Wroclaw on November 15, 2010. Announcement from Wroclaw University of Technology
Thomas Piotrowski joined H2L2 in 1978 bringing his outstanding design [...]
CHAMPS! H2L2 wins Architects Softball League Championship
Team H2L2 is the 2010 Architect’s Softball League CHAMPIONS!!!!
Final Score: IPS – 10, H2L2 -11
That’s right! For the first time ever in our 103-year history! It’s an amazing win, we’re an amazing team, and it’s a victory for the whole firm and anyone who ever wore an H2L2 Softball T-shirt, and that’s a lot of people. [...]
H2L2 competes for new school at the International School of Luxembourg
H2L2’s design approach centers foremost on the critical reading of the site and context as well as the aspirations of bringing a new building of this size to ISL. H2L2’s envisions our design as a “Unified School, in a Park”, which explains the overarching idea to bring to ISL a new building that not only [...]
H2L2’s Natalia Olson-Urtecho travels to China for trade mission
Earlier this month, H2L2’s Director of Global Initiatives, Natalia Olson-Urtecho, traveled to China for a trade mission in conjunction with the World Trade Center of Greater Philadelphia. The mission gives participants an opportunity to meet face-to-face with prospective pre-screened business partners, explore export opportunities for their products and services, and get first-hand experience in the [...]
Douglas Steele, Principal, travels to Haiti to help stricken school
On Tuesday, January 12th, tragic struck the island-nation of Haiti. A catastrophic earthquake left hundreds of thousands killed and about a million people homeless. A quarter of a million residences were either destroyed or damaged and about fifty-thousand commercial properties. One of the properties was The Union School of Haiti.
Douglas Steele, Principal at H2L2 Architects/Planners, [...]
Wagner College dedicates Foundation Hall, designed by H2L2
Wagner College, a private college in Staten Island, New York, dedicated their first residence hall in over forty years a few weeks ago. H2L2 designed the 4-story, 200-bed, $24-million residence hall which maxed out at 72,000 square feet. Construction lasted approximately 2 years and the building was dedicated in March 2010. The new residence hall [...]
H2L2 helps the Organization of American States kick-off their Centennial celebrations
In 2007, H2L2 celebrated our centennial as a firm, which was founded over a hundred years ago by renowned, architect-educator Paul Philippe Cret. Cret‘s firm would have never gotten off the ground without his first major project. That project was the House of Americas for the Organization of American States. In 1907, the Organization of [...]
Bruce Chamberlin, AIA, LEED AP, Senior Associate to present at ECIS
Bruce Chamberlin, AIA, LEED AP, Senior Associate, will present, “Facilities Planning and Design – An Overview” at the upcoming European Council of Independent Schools (ECIS) April Administrator’s Conference between April 8th-11th, 2010 in Malta. Below is a short abstract from Mr. Chamberlin’s presentation.
Mr. Chamberlin will provide an update on current trends in school planning and [...]
First Architectural Firm to Achieve Gold
As a charter member of The Greater Philadelphia Green Business Commitment, H2L2 Architects Planners recently completed 75 sustainable initiatives and became the first architectural firm to achieve Gold status. The firm’s office policies were reformatted to adhere to more sustainable practices to reduce its carbon footprint: the firm officially put into place practices such as [...]
International Bridge Conference Presentation
H2L2 Principal Thomas Piotrowski and Architect Bruce Chamberlin were selected to present a paper at the International Bridge Conference in May, 2009. The paper, entitled “Urban Planning and the Design of Bridges”, addressed America’s need to rehabilitate miles of highways and interstates over the next few decades while keeping safety, planning, efficiency, community impact, and [...]
Ashby & Geddes Wins Award
Detailing in the recently completed law offices of Ashby & Geddes in Wilmington, Delaware, designed by H2L2 and executed by C. Erickson & Sons, Inc., was recently awarded an “Excellence in Craftsmanship” by the General Building Contractors Association.
H2L2 focused on capturing and expressing the firm’s personality. Natural light and a warm neutral color palette set [...]
ING Cafe – Virtual World
ING Direct is making as big an impact on Wilmington as it is on the global financial services industry, while keeping in mind its Dutch origins.
ING Direct believes “saving money should be as simple as having a cup of coffee,” so it has created a number of cafés around the nation where people can come in to sip a latte, surf the Internet, and learn more about ING Direct.
H2L2 helped transform an existing 21,000 square-foot lobby and office space into the company’s fourth national café, which acts as a social outlet for the City of Wilmington and ING Direct employees. The project encompassed four specific public spaces:
- The Lobby, an inviting and gracious entry into the building.
- The Café, adjacent to the lobby, overlooks an existing sunken garden and a notable 19th century Gothic Revival church. Green limestone flooring and an undulating metal-panel ceiling frame the curved coffee bar and futuristic Internet kiosk. The kiosk, 18 feet in diameter, consists of illuminated resin panels surrounded by computer terminals that provide Internet access and interior banquette seating.
- The Living Room, a more secluded gathering space opposite the Café. Here, comfortable sofas and oversized chairs allow small groups to meet and converse. It, too, has an internet kiosk.
- The Ballroom, which allows for large public gatherings or company functions, seats up to approximately 240 people for presentations. This flexible space can also be transformed for catered events, exhibitions, or even dining and dancing.
All four of these spaces provide ING employees with interconnected yet discrete spaces that allow individual and group functions – private, public and overlapping functions – to occur in either a planned fashion or serendipitously throughout the day. ING and H2L2 made a conscious effort in the designing the renovations of the remainder of the existing building’s floors to encourage employees to use the functions on this ground floor daily, and possibly several times a day.
Interestingly, as the corporate world and academia look to each other to collaborate and to form strategic alliances, H2L2 has found that these discrete yet interconnected spaces at ING correlate directly to the academic spaces we design: they match the collaboratory – formally and informally designated spaces where students study or work individually or in groups or just hang out – and multi-media spaces in institutions of higher learning, and there is similarity in the way the spaces are used. In today’s increasingly technology driven world, overlap, flexibility, and the ability to reorder the space and furnishings are the keys to creating successful social and work/academic integration.