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Karen Cook, a founding Partner of PLP Architecture, and previously a partner of KPF’s London office, has been involved with designing tall buildings in Europe for the last decade. Her design approach stems from an analytical process, a respect for context, and the integration of technology and materials, with the aim of making better places in which to work and live.

Karen led the competition winning design in 2003-04, while at KPF, for the radical refurbishment at La Defense of Tour CB31, now Tour First, whose design team she led until her departure in 2009 to found PLP Architecture. The implemented proposal added 1.5m extension to all floors, enlarging layout dimensions to market standards; relocated concrete fire staircases and created a new high-performance façade, bringing the building’s standards up to current regulations; six triple height sky-gardens carved from post-tensioned concrete slabs, bringing daylight into the workplace; three new dining and entrance pavilions at its base, integrating the pinwheel tower into its now orthogonal neighbourhood. The most striking gesture is the reconfiguration of the top, adding and removing floors to create three spiralling volumes, signalling a new life for La Defense. Reborn as France’s tallest tower, HQE certified, Tour First won the 2011 MIPIM Award for Best Office Refurbishment.

Other projects for which Karen led the design while a partner at KPF include The Pinnacle, intended as the tallest tower in the City of London, winning planning permission and influencing townscape policy for both skyline and public realm for the Emerging Eastern Cluster of tall buildings; Benrather Karree, Duesseldorf, advancing the application of technology and materials using translucent onyx bonded to glass as insulated windows and external sunshading panels; Danube House, Prague, winner of a MIPIM Architectural Review Future Projects Prize and Best New Office Building in the Czech Republic, and Nile House, the pair featuring custom crafted, dramatic interiors which form action scene settings for James Bond’s “Casino Royale” and “GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra.”

At PLP Architecture, Karen led the design team winning planning consent for the New West End Company’s Old Cavendish Street Pavilion, a meeting-point designed to improve the public experience along Oxford Street, London. Currently, Karen leads design teams for a high rise residential building in Ottawa, and new schemes in London, Paris and Prague.

Designs which Karen has led have been exhibited at the Royal Academy and form part of the permanent collection at the Pompidou Centre. She is a member of the City Architecture Forum, the Henry Jackson Society and the American Institute of Architects, on whose board she served as Treasurer of the UK Chapter. She has lectured on the topics of Design and Technology, Sustainability and Tall Buildings at professional and student forums, and participated in design competition and student degree juries, in the UK, USA, Czech Republic, France and Belgium.

Karen earned a Masters in Architecture from Harvard University, after receiving the Bachelor in Architecture and the Bachelor of Art (in Art and in Architecture) degrees from Rice University.

Karen Cook, a founding Partner of PLP Architecture, and previously a partner of KPF’s London office, has been involved with designing tall buildings in Europe for the last decade. Her design approach stems from an analytical process, a respect for context, and the integration of technology and materials, with the aim of making better places in which to work and live.

Karen led the competition winning design in 2003-04, while at KPF, for the radical refurbishment at La Defense of Tour CB31, now Tour First, whose design team she led until her departure in 2009 to found PLP Architecture. The implemented proposal added 1.5m extension to all floors, enlarging layout dimensions to market standards; relocated concrete fire staircases and created a new high-performance façade, bringing the building’s standards up to current regulations; six triple height sky-gardens carved from post-tensioned…

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