In regards to a previous question...

Someone asked in an earlier post about how to get rid of efflorescence, the white salts that leach out of a masonry wall when water gets and sits behind the brick face. I asked a brick rep recently about how to fix the problem.

First, make sure that the weep holes in the wall (if there are any) are open and clear at the bottom. It's helpful to make sure that there's a little bit of mesh (almost like plastic Brillo) in the weep holes so that insects don't crawl up in the wall and live there. Having cleared weep holes will allow some water to drain out of the bottom of the wall. Then, check the top of the wall to seal and/or fix any cracks where water could be getting in. After that, the brick rep suggested just letting the wall be for a few months and let the remaining trapped water leach out. After that, a brick supplier or masonry company can help you remove the remaining efflorescence. The solution is not to blast it off with a water power washer, as that will just push water back into the wall and start the problem over. However, it does involve using a power washer that uses a mix of water, a cleaning solution, and a fine-grade particle (like sand) to quasi-sandblast and simultaneously wash the white film off.

By the way, if you have questions about some weird building thing you've seen lately, take a few pictures and send them my way. Maybe I can answer the question, and if nothing else, it gives me something to blog about rather than my pedestrian life.

Quasi Detail of the Week: Fun with Asbestos

Even though I got several phone calls today from my contractor, it was quiet overall, and I got a fair amount of drawing and RFI-answering done, all while propping my foot up on my desk. Every little bit of elevation helps, it seems. It was quiet because, as I mentioned in an earlier post, my procedure suite project was shut down until Tuesday for asbestos abatement and removal.

Quick refresher for some: asbestos was long used as fireproofing on building elements (like beams and columns) as well as in finishes (like wall coverings, fabrics, and flooring products). Even in Roman times, asbestos was used in napkins because they could be burned clean (wish I could find the source on that). However, it was discovered in teh late-1970s/early-1980s that breathing asbestos fibers gave one a touch of the cancer, so asbestos had to be removed or at least sealed up wherever possible (a process called abatement). I recall doing a remodel job up in Fort Collins back when I started at Design Associates in 2000 in the art building at a small college. The project manager I was with wanted to look in the ceiling (we call that "popping a tile", as in popping a ceiling tile up out of its grid so as to have a look around), and the building manager nearly had a stroke. "If you pop a tile, I'll have to shut the building down--we have asbestos on our structure!" he gasped. Hence, until abatement occurred, no one could even do so much as replace a ceiling tile--just had to patch it up.

In the procedure suite at MHRC, the VCT (vinyl composition tile) was safe, but the adhesive used to attach the tile to the concrete slab has asbestos. We had originally planned to just cover the floor, tile, sealant and all, with the new flooring, but the slab was in such bad shape from demolition that we were going to have to bead-blast it (not sure what that entails), then pour a self-leveling topping over the slab, then lay our new flooring on that. The bead-blasting, which I imagine is a lot like sandblasting, would have made the asbestos fibers friable--that is, singular and crispy, able to be handled and breathed--so we had to shut the area down and have it abated.

Not all asbestos removal is this drastic. Sometimes, it's found in pipe insulation on old plumbing systems, and it can simply be removed while wearing some gloves, put in a bag, and picked up by the hazardous waste folks. That also happened on the demo of the procedure area, and it was handled nicely and quietly.

So, the abatement company, which charges handily for its services, will be working through the weekend (charging even more handily, I'm sure) to finish removal. Monday, the state health board comes in and looks everything over and approves it. After that, we can go back in and get going again. My contractor will then begin looking for ways to accelerate the construction schedule so that we can make up for lost time and finish when we said we'd finish.

More construction details later. Guy should be home from his business trip any moment now. I'll have my foot up, anxiously awaiting his arrival. Wonder if I should just go ahead and call Pizza Hut now?

Detail of the Week: The Long and Winding Road

Okay, this is kind of a detail but kind of not. I suppose it's more of an explanation than anything. Yet again, Wandering Author's comment on my last post asked how is it possible to design a room into which it is suddenly found impossible to move equipment. There's more than one reason for this happening, all of them perfectly legitimate.

First: most medical equipment companies understand that not all of their products are sold to brand new facilities. Often, equipment comes crated in more than one piece, and someone moves the crates into the finished space (i.e., with flooring, paint, wall base, ceiling, lights, casework, etc. in it). Then, the installer (sometimes that's the general contractor, and sometimes it's a special installer either from the equipment vendor or approved of and trained by the vendor) unwraps the equipment and moves it into place, hooking it up to power, water, etc. Hence, it's generally not a problem to fit a piece of equipment through a 3'-0" opening.

Second: it's easy to read equipment sizes on the vendor's cut sheets and not make the connection. The sterilizer in question in the last post is described as being 35 7/8" wide. A door is described as 3'-0", or 36" wide. Sounds good, right? Ah, but remember that door frames have a stop in them that the door whacks against when it closes. This door stop is usually about 1/2" to 5/8" deep. So, in a good situation, the actual opening in the door frame, even if you take the door off its hinges, is only about 35". That little fact is easy to forget. Granted, sometimes the doors coming into a soiled processing room is more like 3'-6" wide or even 4'-0" wide, but those doors are also very expensive, so when the owner needs to reduce costs and assures us that all of their soiled processing carts will fit through a 3'-0" door, then we'll give them 3'-0" doors because they'll work just fine for daily use.

Third: there's a shitload of medical equipment in a 70,000-square-foot hospital, and it's no surprise that something's not gonna work quite right, not fit in its spot, or not fit through a door. Sitting on my desk right now is a book of equipment cut sheets for this project, and I kid you not, the binder is eight inches thick. It's the biggest 3-ring binder I've ever seen, and the sheets actually are bursting out of it. When the equipment consultant and I looked at the cut sheet while on the phone together, she said, "Well, I reckon they were expecting us to actually have time to read the whole cut sheet, huh?"

So what do we do with the cut sheets? And what the hell is a cut sheet anyway? Cut sheets are the pages that show pictures of a piece of equipment and also detail how big it is, how much it weighs, what kind of electrical power it needs, what kind of water supply it needs, what kind of ventilation needs it has, and what areas of clearance are required around it (to name a few things). For more complicated pieces of equipment, the cut sheets also detail information about mounting the equipment (does it go on the wall? does it sit on the floor?) and what the contractor needs to provide in order to install the equipment (the equipment comes with the mounting plate, but the contractor will need to provide unistrut supports above the ceiling). The design and construction teams use the cut sheets to make sure they have everything they need to make sure that the equipment can be used when they get there and will actually fit in the room/on the counter/under the countertop/under a 9-foot-high ceiling. Usually, reviewing these cut sheets allows us to notice if something's really big, but alas, we missed this one.

Honestly, Wheatlands has gone pretty well in terms of equipment coordination. The sterilizer and a surgical scrub sink have given us issues, but that's about it. Equipment-wise, we've been lucky.

Detail (sorta) of the Week: Cleanliness is next to punchiness.

I was gonna post another detail about punchlists, but I had some inspiration today while doing some hardcore spring cleaning. Next Friday is Guy's turn to host Poker Night, which will also be the last Poker Night with the inimitable and irreplaceable Jimmy Ray. His wife got a promotion, so he is indeed headed back to the Midwest. (That's a story for another posting.) Our house has been something of a wreck since Guy started painting a few months ago, and it was time to really start cleaning at least the areas that guests would see. We can close off the two bedrooms, but the kitchen, dining room, living room, and bathroom(s) will need to be scrubbed down.

So, I found myself on hands and knees this afternoon, wiping down the tile base along the bathroom walls, and suddenly I realized something: This happens at my buildings too. See, in any building under construction, all the painters and plumbers and carpenters and so on finish their work and move out of the area. Then, the contractor hires a cleaning company to come in and clean the area. What do they clean? A better question would be what do they not clean!

They dust mop (Swiff, shall we say) and wet mop hard surfaces like ceramic and quarry tile, VCT, and sheet vinyl. They vacuum carpet. They damp wipe everything: painted walls, countertops, cabinet doors, shelves inside and outside the cabinets, doors into rooms, wall base, blinds, everything. They dust off or wet wipe vinyl wallcoverings, shake out and spot or steam clean draperies or fabric wallcoverings, wipe and dry windows to be spot free. They wipe down every sink and toilet, wipe and dry off stainless steel counters and sinks (don't want spots, now do we?)...they even wipe off the lenses and shades on light fixtures.

Imagine wiping down Every. Single. Surface. In your house. Imagine your house is empty of stuff--no dishes, no knickknacks, just basic or even no furniture...but you have to wipe, scrub, and clean every surface. I found myself thinking about this as I scrubbed the walls and ceiling of my bathroom with Clorox Clean-Up and water, wiped the underside of the toilet bowl, scoured the tile floor and wall base, and swiped my now-tattered sponge across the plastic laminate of my bathroom counter. My condo is only 1,315 square feet. Imagine having to clean this thoroughly over 68,000 square feet.

I nearly fainted at the thought. I'm such a wimp--my upper back and lower calves hurt from all that crawling, scrubbing, and mopping. Time to curl up on the sofa and put my feet up.

Detail of the Week: Expand your horizons...and your roof.

Buildings are big, some of them really big. When a building is big enough, it needs expansion joints to allow the building to expand when it gets really warm and contract when it gets really cold. It sounds like not much of a deal, perhaps, but when you have two 35-foot long steel beams each trying to expand one inch into each other, finishes can crack or warp or worse, the structure can deflect and cause structural failure. I found some photos here recently of an expansion joint system in the roof of a one-story building with a concrete structure and precast concrete exterior.

Here's a photo of the expansion joint coming up to the exterior wall where two precast concrete panels come together.

The expansion joint itself is a product that the architect specifies and the contractor buys and installs. They come in a pretty wide range of shapes and sizes, depending on where you want to put it and how wide the expansion joint is (the more movement that's expected, the wider the joint--this joint is about 2 inches wide). This joint is in the open on a roof, so it looks like a thick rubber half-of-a-tube with a piece on each side that the contractor attaches to wood blocking on top of metal studs. The wood blocking/metal studs are the box underneath the expansion joint bump. The contractor then puts a rubber-polymer roofing material over it (well call it an EPDM sheet in da biz), seals it down with an adhesive, and covers all edges and gaps with a sealant. An expansion joint has to run from one exterior wall to another exterior wall. This one goes to a space between two exterior panels and all the way down to the ground on the other side. You can see the tan-orange sealant on top of the panel gap. On the other side, there's a piece of spongy material adhered into the gap between the panels going down the face of the building.

When a building has a couple of wings or big chunks coming together, the expansion joints have to intersect. This is not always perty. However, this contractor did a really nice job of bringing the three wings of this building together.

This expansion joint also runs to a clearstory, which is the name for a part of a roof that pops up above the rest to get some natural light into a building. You see it hit right behind the column on the end of the clearstory. See the gap in the yellow sheathing on the column and the sheathing on the soffit (the horizontal parts of the roof)? The expansion joint is wrapping up around the column and running along the high side of this angled roof.

How can this be? Doesn't the roof structure have to be connected to some beams or something? Well, sure. The roof joists are attached firmly to the beams on the low side of the clearstory. However, because the expansion joint runs along the high side of this clearstory, the joists sit on Teflon pads. One pad is attached to the joist, and the other is attached to the beam holding it up.

The Teflon pads are the thin light-colored wafers between the rusty-looking steel plates. The upside-down U-shaped piece of steel on top allows the joists to sit at an angle.

Here's the thing about expansion joints: pretty much finish needs an expansion joint. The brick face on a building needs an expansion joint at least every 200 feet (if I recall correctly), and even drywall needs very small, pretty expansion joints, called control joints, in wide expanses of walls.

The little lines in that drywall are control joints. Here, they're being used for aesthetics, to separate different colors in this decorative soffit. The control joint is a little piece of V-shaped plastic about 1/4-of-an-inch wide with little flanges that the drywall contractor muds into the drywall on each side of the joint. It allows the drywall to expand and contract so it doesn't crack and look skanky.

Have I expanded your horizons with my expansion joints? Good. Now go have a good weekend.

Detail of the Week: When Good Drawings Go Bad

Well, not so much the drawings, perhaps, as the contractors reading the drawings incorrectly with big-time consequences. Generally, when a contractor reads a drawing and isn't sure what's being represented or think he or she is reading it incorrectly, the contractor will call the architect or ask the question in a Request For Information, or an RFI. My present contractor on Wheatlands is really good about this. Mark calls and asks me the question, then we work through it, then he issues an RFI to confirm our decision. Interestingly, this saves us time overall because we both worked through the solution instead of me issuing him a solution that might still not work or might cause more problems than it solves.

However...sometimes it doesn't occur to the contractor to ask. They assume their reading is correct and do something totally unintended. Sometiems these errors are huge, and sometimes, they're silly, like our first detail. This was on a project of a former colleague of Sarge's. We often note details in a plan by putting a dashed circle or rectangle around the detail and note the sheet and detail number off to the side and connect the detail and sheet number to the dashed circle with a line called a leader line. This sort of detail is shown on the right. However, the contractor interpreted this as the edge of the top step and built it as shown on the left. As the architect commented to Sarge, "They built the fucking leader line."Guy passed this around his office, and one of his colleagues noted that the stair as built violates code. Because of this, as well as because they didn't build it as the architect drew it, the architect would be completely in his right to tell the contractor to tear this out and build it correctly. Building codes require that the height of any step (called a riser) be of a minimum height, and this stair likely doesn't meet that. Look at the plan; only three stairs (four risers) are shown, but the contractor had to do the math to change the height of each riser in order to make what he thought was the extra riser but was actually the leader line between the detail and sheet number and the rectangle around the detail.

Below is another detail on a project a friend of mine worked on several years ago. This is a drywall soffit in a hallway. You can see the lines that go from the wall to the edge of the curved soffit; those are control joints, which allow large expanses of drywall to expand and contract with heat. But see the line running longways down the soffit?

That line is actually a grid line. A grid line is an imaginary line that runs through the center of the structural columns and is used not only to locate the columns and beams but is also used to help dimension other things in the floor plans and ceiling plans. So, the outer edge of the curve of this soffit was dimensioned off this gridline. However, the contractor read this in reverse--he thought that the architect was trying to show an architectural reveal in the underside of the soffit dimensioned off the edge of the soffit. While this doesn't violate any codes, it just looks doofy. it's the only soffit in the hall with this line in it. "They built the grid line in, Pixie!" my friend sighed. "It looks different from everything else on the plan, but they read it like it was a reveal! What the hell?"

I'll have something more amusing tomorrow, but believe me, when we passed these details around our office, we howled with laughter.

I know, I know...we're total archinerds....

Detail of the Week: Demolition is fun!

We architects are taught to build things, but not so much to tear them down. Pity, really; there's so much that needs to be demolished. Strip malls, deserted big box stores, the completed works of Frank Gehry...and this building I passed on the way to lunch today. It had been one nightclub or another for the past few years, each club owner painting its double-tee concrete exterior some hideous blend of colors. First, it was a nightclub with a beach theme (because nothing says "beach" like two feet of snow and 30-mph winds at a mile above sea level), so they painted the exterior a light yellow with turquoise waves. Then it was a swingin' hotspot with bright yellow and red flames on the sides. Its final incarnation was a south-of-the-border themed club, which was mercifully shut down. Finally a development company bought the building and demolished it. The plan, so I hear, is to put up some high end lofts in the building's place. Evidently, what downtown Denver really needs right now is more high-end lofts.

The exterior, as I mentioned, was made up of precast concrete double tees, which so I hear were invented right here in Denver. They can be used as load bearing walls, as they were in Club Nasty, or as a roof, as they were in this photo (taken looking up through a grid ceiling with the tiles removed).

You can see the legs of the tee coming down from the roof slab. That slab's about 2 inches thick, and each leg is about 30 inches deep. When you look at the end of a double tee, it looks like this: TT. Here's what's left of the double tees that made up the exterior wall of Club Nasty--note that there's a chaink link fence around the site. The construction company has to keep unauthorized people off the site because if the wander around on it and get hurt, they can sue...even though the boneheaded move of wandering around on a construction site without protective gear and a clue is totally their fault.

The legs on these tees were only about 12 to 16 inches deep. The slab part of the tee rested on the building's slab, which was poured separately from the sidewalk, which is why the bottom part of the tee legs is still stuck on the sidewalk. The rest of the tees are gone because they could be easily removed along with the building's slab. The top picture shows the rebar in the tees (those dark wiry things sticking out). They weren't able to remove all of the tee that was against the new loft building, though.
See the blue plastic stuff on the wall? Sarge and I are betting that pulling down Club Nasty's party wall (the wall that was right up against the loft building) opened a hole in the loft's party wall, so they have to keep water out until someone can get over there to fix it. You can see the rest of the party wall in this photo. The sludgy grey stuff is the mortar between the bricks. That's what mortar looks like on the back side of a brick wall, where you can't clean it off with a trowel. Now these two photos are the coolest, and mercifully, the last ones of this post.

The upper photo shows the line of Club Nasty. Can you see the little ledges of brick hanging over the top of where it used to be? I'm not entirely sure what that's about--perhaps the architect was moving the bricks out so s/he could make the upper floors a little bigger, or maybe s/he was just making a comment about the hideous building below it. There's also a different color of brick and mortar at the bottom of the loft's party wall, next to the weirdly-painted foundation wall. This might be because the loft building used a differnt type of brick for the bottom of its party wall, or because it used some existing brick in the wall instead of tearing it out (this part of downtown is about 130 years old). You also see how there are some stripes where the bricks are turned differently so you can see the holes in them? Sarge and I are wondering if perhaps those protions of brick aligned with some concrete columns in Club Nasty on this side. See how the foundation bumps out at each of those funny areas? I'm thinking we're right--structural engineers often enlarge the foundations at column locations so they can distribute more of the load. I'm still wondering why the bricks would be turned differently at the columns, though....

Everyone still with me? Good! Well, faithful WAD readers, I'll reward your patience with this extra-long extended-rave-mix of a Detail of the Week with some good gossip about Wanda tomorrow. I'm worn out from working on Pomme de Terre all week.

Actually, it's not gossip if it's true. And Shorty spit de troof.

Prodigal Detail of the Week

Since Wandering Author's question about fireproofing in the World Trade Center, I've been thinking about this detail. I found this one in an office building built by our office a few years ago. Those C-shaped things in the walls are metal studs. If you do your own remodeling projects at home, you'll use wood studs, which would be drawn in this detail as a rectangle with an "x" through it. While wood studs can be treated with fire-retardant chemicals, metal studs are used more often than wood studs in commercial and large multifamily residential construction projects that require a high degree of noncombustability (is that even a word?).

Building codes dictate so many aspects of a building, including the materials used to make them. First, building codes allow an architect to use wood frame construction if the building is under a certain area (in square feet) and under a certain number of stories. How many square feet and how many stories depends on what kind of building it is: a wood-frame office building can be larger than a wood frame nursing home. Some types of buildings, such as structures that store hazardous materials, are not allowed to be of wood construction at all. Also, putting a sprinkler system in your building allows the architect to greatly increase the size of the building.

Structural systems for large buildings and buildings that require a great deal of fire resistance are either steel or concrete. Concrete columns and beams have steel reinforcing bar in them (called "rebar" in da biz) that allows them to stretch when the beams get really warm, and concrete is especially handy for long spans (this is one of several reasons concrete beams are used to build bridges--it can span 60 to 100 feet). Concrete is also naturally fire resistant, but it's often more expensive that steel. Steel is usually an economical way to support normal spans in a building, such as 25 to 35 feet.

However, steel columns, like the one shown above, are not inherently fire resistant.; when exposed to high temperatures, the steel deforms and fails. Sometimes, steel beams and columns are painted with a paint called intumescent paint, which creates water when it comes in contact with heat and drips on the fire, defending the steel from the intense heat and buying some more time for the firefighters to arrive and put out the flames. The more typical manner in which steel is protected and given a "fire rating" is the sprayed-on fireproofing that is shown above. I'm not sure what it's made of exactly, but it protects and insulates the steel from fire. It's lumpy, whitish-grey stuff, so if the column can be seen, the column is covered with framing and gypsum board (drywall). The framing-and-drywall covering also serves to protect the firespray from being damaged, causing it to flake off and reduce the fire protection.

That is all for now. Tell your friends at the water cooler tomorrow....

Detail of the Week

In an attempt to edify as well as possibly amuse, WAD presents a Detail of the Week. Learn about the minutiae of architecture without actually finding out anything that you could share around the water cooler on Monday.

Below is a photo of an ADA sink panel, which you'd likely find in a medical facility:


Why, I bet you're asking, didn't the architect just put cabinet doors below the sink? Good question. Here's the deal: in order for a sink to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the sink cannot be higher than 2'-10" above the floor, and a wheelchair must be able to slide underneath the counter so the person can reach the sink controls and put their hands under the water stream.

Also, many (though not all) medical facilities are inspected and accredited by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO, pronounced "jay-ko" in da biz). Accreditation by JCAHO assures that a health facility has high standards and is safe and good and right and wonderful. It also makes their insurance rates lower, so I hear. one of JCAHO's rules is that nothing can be stored underneath a sink because it might be toxic, or worse, toxic and forgotten about. Storage space in a medical facility is of the utmost importance, so if you give them cabinet doors under a sink and say "don't put anything there," you can bet as soon as that damned architect is out of the room, they're gonna chuck some extra antibacterial soap and paper towels and Formula 409 and a box of lollipops for the kids under there. Or something.

So, no cabinet doors. But you still need something to hide the pipes under there, right? Cuz it's gotta be perrty. Hence...the panel. But just how does one get that panel on there? Hmm?




Oh-ho-ho! There's one of these latches at the top and bottom of the panel on the left and right sides. The hooks on the panel slides neatly onto the little brackets inside the cabinet. Now, it hides the pipes from view, protects the knees of anyone in a wheelchair, and provides no real storage space for would-be storage addicts.

In other news, Wanda took it upon herself to print the whole Pomme de Terre set at 4pm today. I told her I'd print my sheets as well as Leslie's but she wanted to batch publish them. This means that her computer was probably locked up for an hour while the software printed every single sheet. The rest of the Pomme de Terre team showed their solidarity by leaving at 4:05. I can't say I blame them. I hope all of them have a good weekend--that whole group has spent way too much time in the office this week.