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Experience

KHA is a young firm (founded in 2005) with wide experience, owing to Kevin's 25 years of design leadership at three prominent firms: Gensler, SMWM, and Cesar Pelli & Associates. This experience includes:
- Education architecture and campus planning
  campus design
- Commercial buildings
- Special purpose buildings like Moscone West Convention Center and a rock-and-roll arena
- Bridges for cars and people.
Since the firm's opening, our experience has expanded to include athletic facilities, high-rise residential buildings and building rehabilitation.

Research

We start our design work with close attention to the place and program; we try to understand the project's broadest goals and most particular quirks. We love the research that precedes and accompanies design, and we are always ready to try our hands on a new project type. We look for projects that demand thoughtful innovation, meaningful reconsideration of the norm, careful interventions in context. We feel responsible for the meanings conveyed by the built forms of our designs.

Working Together

We are adept at working with groups, large and small, with projects in a public setting, and projects that have multiple users. We listen to and learn from our clients, in pursuit of solutions that are particularly responsive, and responsible. We work in the open so we can be inspired by the participation of our clients.

Our preferred design tools are real and virtual models, which we use to seek and test ideas, and to help our clients envision the alternatives and their implications. Our design process is a flexible and inquisitive exploration of alternative solutions, punctuated by frequent discussions with our clients.

Predispositions

- Our design work is not constrained by a signature style; instead, we seek inspiration within the circumstances of each project, and from thoughtful collaboration with our clients.
- We believe that excellent architecture is responsive to the problem, to the place, to the needs of the users, and to the constraints of the budget.
- We admire buildings that are direct and uncomplicated, solutions that resolve spatial relationships and functional problems simply and clearly.
- We think that buildings should excite the imagination, should provoke an emotional response, and should be beautiful.
- We love the materials of construction, and we try to use them with intelligence and sympathy for their inherent characteristics.
- We believe that a design conveys a meaning that expresses the intentions of the owner, and we look for the ways that these intentions can be the core of the design.
- We work to integrate a new building into the fabric of its context, and to preserve flexibility for future growth and change.

Sustainability

Buildings use more than a third of all the energy we produce in the US, and this confers a special responsibility on us who design and build them. Our all-LEED AP professional staff take a sustainable approach to the design of our projects, and help our clients to accrue the economic benefits that result. The strategies that help buildings to use energy more efficiently can create healthier, more flexible, and more enjoyable places for their users.