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HOK engages 430 employees across nine offices worldwide to turn a 3,200-acre desert site in Saudi Arabia into the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
Bill Odell is an expert in collaboration. The director of HOK's Science and Technology Group, he specializes in designing laboratories that give researchers a chance to share ideas, often informally. In a YouTube video, Odell describes "the lab of the future" as a place not primarily for scientific apparatus, but for human interaction. And Odell practices what he preaches. At HOK, he says, the culture is so collaborative that it takes some new employees by surprise. "Most people become very comfortable with it, and realize how much more we can do together," he says, "but some people just can't deal with it and leave."
It's possible that no project at HOK has ever required as much collaboration as the campus of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (known as KAUST), which is rising along the Red Sea 50 miles north of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Flying over the site earlier this year, "it looked like someone kicked an anthill," in the words of Monte Wilson, a senior vice president in HOK's Planning Group. Thousands of construction workers were readying the campus for the arrival, in early September, of 65 professors and several hundred graduate students, according to Jeff Weintraub, a Washington, D.C.-based spokesman for KAUST.
That group is just the tip of the sand dune: KAUST is designed to accommodate thousands of researchers from around the world. Promises of academic freedom is one attraction. Another is brand-new facilities. The Saudi king - who committed more than $10 billion to the project - is determined to provide the best of everything, both on the campus proper and in the new community, incorporating extensive cultural and recreational facilities, rising around it.
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