Bio:
Tom is HDR's design director for sustainability and a design principal in the Los Angeles studio. He actively leads the design direction of projects and our global efforts on low-carbon solutions. His current mass timber projects on the U.S. West Coast and Asia use our carbon-balancing methodology, targeting net-zero emitted carbon on day one for structure, core and shell.
His recent mass timber projects include the Orange County Sanitation District HQ, mass timber design and bridging documents for the WSU Plant Biosciences Research Lab in Pullman Washington. For the new business center for BMS outside of Seattle, where mass timber was not feasible due to schedule, lowering embodied carbon is achieved through design efficiency, and low-carbon steel and concrete choices.
He is a frequent lecturer on design innovation, and the potential for long-term carbon sequestration of buildings at-scale, to reduce the climate impact of urbanization. Tom earned a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and is a recipient of over 25 design awards. He was the pro-bono design leader for an all-volunteer team for the U.S. Green Building Council's Children’s Center in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The LEED Platinum and WELL Gold goals achieved triple net-zero in 2018.
His past projects in the U.S, Asia, Brazil, Middle East and Haiti explore connections between people, place and ecology. Knittel holds a Masters from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, is a certified biomimicry professional, studied at SCI-Arc, and has received over 30 design awards across a broad range of building types. He donates his time as the design leader for The William Jefferson Clinton Children’s Center in Port au Prince (currently under construction), a new family learning center and orphanage funded by the USGBC designed to LEED Platinum and net-zero standards, a project he began at HOK and continued to develop at MD, adapting the design to new larger site and complete documents. He is a registered architect in Montana, Missouri and is a member of the NCARB.
From 2015 to 2017 he was the design partner at a boutique architectural firm focused on net-zero, low carbon and living buildings. He led the design of several projects, many aspiring to a Living Building standard.
Formerly, Tom was a Senior Principal | Design at HOK, were he started as a Principal in the New York office in 2007. He led the design of many completed projects, including the Engineering and Science Building for KAUST and the envelope team for the design of facades campus-wide. It was the largest LEED Platinum project at the time, was designed and constructed in 30 months, and was awarded an AIA Top Ten Green award, Lab of the Year, among others. He designed the Commonwealth Medical Center in Scranton, Pennsylvania (completed 2011), the Ventura County Replacement Hospital (Design Build, completion in 2017), Kaiser Reference Laboratory (completion 2017) ), the Baldwin Hills Kaiser MOB (completion in 2018), and a 2.1M SF Mixed Use project in Wuhan China (completed 2017). Several unbuilt projects charted new territory in planning (Meixi Lake), ecological design (LBD Commercial Center in Sao Paulo)., and place-based inspiration and net-zero design (Golden Empire Transit in Bakersfield, California. He co-authored the Genius of Biome report with Biomimicry 3.8 in 2013.
Prior to HOK, Tom completed his Masters at Harvard Graduate School of Design (2005-6), and shortlisted as a Loeb Fellow in 2005.
Prior, Tom worked for 15 years at BNIM, an early green-adopting architectural practice in Kansas City, Missouri. Tom learned the practice of architecture and eventually rose to Studio Leader, Associate Principal, and was responsible for the design of a broad range of architecture and planning projects at a variety of scales. He led the design efforts on projects that received over 25 design awards, including a Design Excellence Award from the GSA for the Bolling Federal Center, in Kansas City, the 2005 ASLA Excellence award for the Noisette Masterplan, regional awards for the Kansas City Artspace, Board of Public Utilities, among many others. He also designed several houses for friends in Kansas City as a form of design research, the first of which published in DWELL magazine in October 2002.
Writings:
Resilient Design: Modeling Architecture’s Future in the Face of Climate Change Arcade 34.3 Winter 2016
Creativity in Crisis Innovation Magazine, Winter 2016
3-part Fast Company series:
Webinars:
The Role of Nature in Buildings of the Future DOE Webinar http://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/doe-announces-webinars-buildings-future-building-america-research-tools-and-more. The webinar recording is available here.
Lectures
Lectures, and Conferences:
AIA North Carolina learning program February 2023: Mass Timber to Reduce Embodied Carbon
UCOP CPI Presentation 2022: Mass Timber to Reduce Embodied Carbon
I2SL Conference 2022: Lowering Embodied Carbon Through Biobased Design: The Challenges to Planning a Mass Timber Lab
USGBC-LA Thought Leadership Series 2022: Renewal of Wood & Future of Mass Timber
1.5 Degrees: A Symposium on Climate Change 2021, Los Angeles Three Mass Timber Case Studies + Panel discussion
AIA Colorado JUST Conference Keynote 2020: A Just Future Through Carbon-Balanced Buildings
Carbon Positive 2020, Los Angeles Mass Timber and Project Delivery
UM School of Forestry and Conservation 2019: Mass Timber Workshop Keynote
UM School of Forestry and Conservation 2017: Cities as Forests: toward a circular economy
New York State Green Building Conference 2017: Keynote Designed Resilience
Seattle Design Festival 2016 Biomimicry and Design Change
ILFI Conference 2016 Biomimetic Structures
Generous Cities: Design Informed by the Ecologies of Place
2015 Palapa conference in Los Angeles http://www.aialosangeles.org/calendar/palapa-ii#.VSAVLE3wuWg
ASU School of Design 2015 Generous Cities
LAEP Colloquium: Thomas Knittel-Buildings Imitating Earth’s Creatures Could Save Us from Ourselves
UC Berkeley 2014
Biomimicry for Green Building: Harnessing the genius of nature to help conserve water
USGBC Los Angeles 2014
Generous Cities Informed by Ecologies of Place
BanffSession 2014
Sustaining Our World Lecture: Built Ecologies: Regionalism and Resource Integration in the Built World, College of the Environment and the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, UW, 2013
Nature Knows Best: How Ecologies Inspire the Built Environment
Sea Change AIA/AIBC conference, Vancouver, 2013
Bringing the Genius of a Biome to Create Resiliency in the Built Environment
Living Future Conference 2013
Biomimicry Applied to Design: Case Studies of International Biomimicry Projects
Keynote, Biomimicry Puget Sound Launch, Seattle, November 2012
Project Haiti: A Sustainable Model for Rebuilding in Haiti
Greenbuild and AFH Conference, San Francisco, November 2012
Architecture That Imitates Life
Architecture in Health Panel, Portland Oregon, August 2012
Biomimicry, Fully Integrated Thinking (FIT) and the Future of Sustainable Design
USGBC Headquarters, Washington D.C., March 2012
Nature, Urban Space & Biomimicry
Museum of Vancouver, Vancouver, January 2012 and
Buildex, Vancouver, February 2012
Biomimicry: Architecture and Adaptation
Columbia University, GSAPP, February 2009
Academia:
Teaching
ARCH 517 Biomimicry: Façade Principles Extracted from Nature
USC Spring 2015
Guest Critic
Studio One Master’s Thesis interim and Final Reviews
UC Berkeley Spring 2014