KPF Review: Design Technology

At KPF, it is our core goal to elevate cities through impactful design, creating high performing, carefully crafted buildings and neighborhood plans that are unique to their physical, social, and environmental contexts. Across scales, project types, and continents, our firm’s unique technological capabilities enable us to create great places, architectural icons, and innovative design solutions that unlock value for our clients. We use cutting-edge technology and data-driven insights to inform our design processes and create buildings and places that put people first.

Note:

This article originally appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of KPF Review.

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At every phase of a project’s design, from first concepts to final construction documentation, our designers leverage the expertise, innovative digital tools, and evidence-based solutions of our Design Technology group. This group applies new tools, techniques, workflows, and data to solve design problems and features a robust software development team that builds brand-new tools for designers, clients, and the public. The projects featured in this edition of KPF Review show the Design Technology group in action. They show how Design Technology’s tools enable KPF to envision highly ambitious projects, communicate design ideas to diverse stakeholders, and ultimately create projects that are buildable and well documented.

When we look at the most significant projects on our firm’s boards today, such as North Bund Lot 91, in Shanghai, we see that technology supports not only the scale of our vision, but our aim to build more responsible, context-driven projects. On the other end of the spectrum, our firm leverages its depth of spatial knowledge and unique capacity for software development to create digital and web-based tools that help KPF designers, our clients, and members of the public understand and positively impact the built environment.

At KPF, technology is always a tool in the service of impactful design, helping de-risk decision-making and driving projects toward better solutions and more effective interventions in the support of better cities for people.

For projects small to large, of varied program, across multiple continents, designers leverage KPF’s robust technological capabilities to achieve the most impactful designs possible.

At KPF, we develop and employ custom workflows and software along with relevant data and industry-leading technology to generate the best possible designs for our projects. We produce buildings and places that maximize value for our clients, delight their inhabitants, uplift their communities, mitigate their ecological impacts, and achieve ambitious performance targets.

Technology is a constant presence in our firm’s most ambitious projects—from the urban analysis and pedestrian flow modeling that ensured New York City’s One Vanderbilt met its social and public realm goals, to the parametrically designed organic forms of the Zayed International Airport Terminal A in Abu Dhabi. In the U.K., we built proprietary data analysis tools to generate an evidence-based strategic vision for King’s College London’s diffuse urban campus. On the other side of the globe, in China, KPF leveraged advanced computational design to rationalize and optimize a curved glass façade for an iconic retail destination, whose thousands of panels take on the form of a gaseous cloud.

At King’s College London, building and occupancy data was collated and combined in a three-dimensional model and dashboard where university planners can see how real estate assets are actually being used.

At KPF, we use technology to communicate every aspect of a project, from the biggest concept to the smallest detail, bringing people together around ideas, inspiring consensus among the design and development team, demystifying design for stakeholders, and keeping projects on track. We perform exhaustive testing with performance models, comparing thousands of design options to de-risk decision making for our clients. We leverage data and tools such as virtual reality, visualization, 3D modeling, and our custom-built web applications to align and empower diverse users, allowing citizens to explore data that is typically the domain of experts and come to their own conclusions.

At The Rise, a major mixed-use development in California, we used technology to uncover certainty. Our custom urban analysis tool, Scout, was able to iterate through tens of thousands of possible planning schemes to find the optimal arrangement to meet client needs. The placemaking strategy for Entrecampos, in Lisbon, meanwhile, demonstrates how demographic behavior analysis can yield a site layout that is optimized for walkability.

Technology can also be a powerful tool to connect people with design. Using virtual reality, we were able to bring clients and members of the public inside 176–178 York Way, a lab and workplace building with a strong community component in the United Kingdom, before it was built. In our work with the Hawai‘i Housing Lab, on the other hand, we created a tool that allows community members to interpret urban data and reveal insights by toggling between neighborhood elements such as density, transit, and street width to see how each variable impacts their community’s comfort and efficiency.

At The Rise, we used our web-based platform, Scout, to analyze thousands of configurations of the design scheme to find the best solution that was optimized to meet multiple criteria.

At KPF, we use technology to bring big ideas, complex projects, and daring designs to life. Through a robust, integrated BIM workflow that KPF manages in-house, we make coordination across teams and professions easy, unlocking the power of collaboration at large scales. We use digital tools to rationalize complex forms, creating buildable solutions without sacrificing design intent, and we leverage design technology to ensure that our projects meet targets for environmental performance and resilience.

Using computational design tools, we thread the needle between construction cost and design intent, arriving at solutions such as One Island Drive in Miami, a tower that maximizes value through the computational optimization of balcony forms. Technology helps guide our projects toward more sustainable outcomes as well. At the Singtel headquarters in Singapore, extensive building performance and environmental modeling yielded the design for a truly net-zero office complex planted with abundant greenery.

When it comes to project delivery, KPF’s advanced BIM modeling allows for innovation on the most ambitious jobs, such as Europe’s tallest life sciences lab, London’s One North Quay. Modular construction techniques, such as those used for Chapter London Bridge, can enable rapid, high-quality construction with less waste and environmental impact.

At the Singtel Headquarters, KPF’s outdoor daylight analysis demonstrated that 100% of plantings on the project’s roof, façade, and in the shaded pedestrian atrium will receive adequate sunlight.