What it's actually like to be an architect

I'm shamelessly stealing this from Lulu Brown over at her rather well-edited and decently-educational blog. I laughed my ass off at this.

[slumping on the chaise with a glass of wine]

Y'all, Shorty is worn out. I just got done with the submission deadline for a presentation I'm doing later this year, and now I'm about to embark on the journey of four deadlines in nine days. This means that while there are plenty of interesting architectural activities going on (and even a little gossip to share), I just don't have the energy to blog it all for now. Instead, I'll share a few photos that my friend LFP took recently. LEP came out for a weekend to Denver (from Bawston, I sweah to Gawd), and we took him to the Museum of Contemporary Art, the latest cool architectural and cultural addition to the Denver landscape. Designed by David Adjaye, a starchitect I can actually tolerate, the building is made with a double exterior wall--1" black glass on the outside and white translucent panels on the inside--that eliminate the need for A/C (just an evaporative cooler is needed), which helped the building earn a LEED Gold rating.

Monday Visual Inspiration: Liebskind's Mall--um, I mean "Crystal"

After we checked out of the Venetian but before heading to Baxtersmum's Casa, we had to visit City Center, the new retail, resort, and housing complex in the middle of the Vegas strip. It was recommended to us that we park at the Bellagio and use their tram to get to City Center--trying to park at City Center is evidently a nightmare. Here's the funny thing, though; when you park at the Bellagio's parking deck, you can see the tram from your parking space, but you have to walk clear through the casino to get to it. You can see it, I mean if you had wings you could fly to it from the parking deck, but nay, prithee, thou must walk through the valley of one-armed bandits before thou seest the tram. (That's not an accident in planning, btw: just as all roads led to Rome, all roads now lead to a casino in a casino/resort in Vegas. Spendeth thy munniez, they say.)

So this is the tram station. Nice and late 20th/early 21st-century detailing with the silver metal supports and the tensile fabric roof. That's going to make this area pretty nice in summer--knocks a few degrees off the 115-degree average summer days.

When you get off the tram at City Center/Crystal, there's a courtyard below the tram station. Mad props that the trees look like they're in decent shape, though again we'll wait to see what they look like in July. Not sure about the white humping protoplasm statue in the middle of the courtyard. In the words of Billy Mays, but wait, there's more!

Holy vertigo, Batman! This is just the lobby/walkway between the mall part of the Crystal and the escalator down from the tram. Technically, we're inside the Crystal, Liebskind's mall, but we're not to the actual spendy part of the mall yet.

Nope, still not there. Keep walking.

As my Southern grandmother would say, "Jeezus Gawd." There's not a plumb wall in the place...which is the point. It would appear that Mr. Liebskind has taken the Denver Art Museum and plopped it down here...but not without learning from his mistakes in Denver. First off, you can't see the roof from any street. Good idea: that way no one can see that it's plainly leaking or failing. Second, instead of doing a typical EPDM roof like he did at DAM, he clad the entire exterior with the same metal panels that he used for the exterior wall. Which actually makes sense: if none of the exterior surfaces on your building are perpendicular or parallel to the ground, then you really don't have a "roof"--everything's technically a wall, albeit some steep and some shallow walls. Here's hoping they don't get leaks. Actually Vegas doesn't get that much snow, so there probably won't be a crapton of leak opportunities, will there?

Where was I? Oh, yeah, the building.

The interior is so open that these photos don't do them justice. It's wider, much wider than a typical mall, so when I think about how much of this building technically isn't rentable, it blows me away. Only about half the tenants (i.e. shops and restaurants) are in, though I hear that they're completely booked. Good to know that they're busy. I suppose rentable s.f. quantity is made up for in quality: they charge more for rent because you're in a really coolio awesome building that everyone will want to go into and walk around and maybe even buy something.

Even the mannequins are dizzy. "Which way is up? Oh glory be! I'm so disoriented I can barely pay $5,000 for this dress I'm wearing!"

Outside is a similar story, except it's titanium instead of white drywall. And glazing--good Lawd at the glazing. How hot is that gonna be in summer?

We took this shot from the courtyard between the Crystal and the Mandarin (another hotel/residence thingy in City Center). Here's the thing--you can bag on Liebskind all you want (and believe me, I do), but his buildings are really cool to be in and look at.

But what does he think of having ads all over his masterpiece?

By this time, we'd had enough starchitecture tomfoolery, so it was off to the Casa del Baxter y Kittehs Tambien, just west of town. There, we finally met The Baxter, teh puppeh of WIN and awsum. He promptly peed on Guy upon meeting us. Funny, I had the same reaction when I met Guy.

Thomas O'Malley also found Guy much to his liking and immediately came up for snuggies, face rubs, purring, and knitting.

Tinkerbell is as much of a chorb as Malley is a lap-ho. I wanted to nom. her. belleh. so badly. However, I settled for petting her and letting her rub around my feet. After we returned from dinner and a comedy show, Guy and I slept comfortably in Baxtersmum's guest room with two kittehs on us the whole night. This was actually comforting for me; I'm so used to having Maddy on me that I needed someone to meow and knitknitknit and bother me occasionally just so I could sleep decently. (I know that doesn't make sense, but if you live with really social cats, you know what I mean.)

When we left Vegas on Monday, it was in the high 50s there...and 23 degrees in Denver. Eeek. All good things must come to an end, I suppose...

Scooby-Don't

Guy wrapped up a major deadline last week as well, which was DD drawings for a classroom and research facility for a college campus with the starchitects at Scooby-Doo & Associates. A few weeks ago, Guy wrote them an email saying that they really needed to get their detailing together because the Revit model (the drawings, as it were) that they kept sending him wasn't up to date or useful to him. For the love of Renzo, the windows they were showing in the plan didn't even course with the bricks (i.e., have a width that is evenly divisible by 4" or 8" and a height that is evenly divisible by 8"). So, Guy sent out this polite-but-firm coming-to-Jesus email, and nothing happened. A few days later, he was booked on a plane to New York to spend three days helping SD&A work out their detailing. Well, isn't that nice?

So Guy flies out there on a Saturday and spends 13 hours on Sunday, 15 hours on Monday, and 6 hours on Tuesday before getting on a plane and flying back to Denver, helping these people find their asses with both hands and a flashlight. (I think Guy held the flashlight for part of that process.) On his last day there, Guy found out that his email had indeed put the fear of Richard Meier into these people. SD&A's design team truly had no idea that the project and the model was in that bad of shape. Turns out they were designing their exterior elevations in AutoCAD but not transferring those changes and ideas to the exterior (core & shell) model, which was being done in Revit. Matter of fact, there was only one guy maintaining and updating this huge-ass Revit model, and several designers fiddling and fuddling over sketch paper and the CAD elevations.

Now, the design and construction people reading this are clutching their chests and trying not to faint, but I know the rest of you may be doing the "Baroo?" look. Allow me to explain. Let's say you have a master calendar on your wall that shows all the comings and goings of the people in your family. This master calendar is for a whole year, and it shows the vacation days and birthdays and anniversaries and days that people are traveling for work or having their wisdom teeth removed and so on for the entire next twelve months. You need this master calendar to stay updated so that you can use it to figure out when to plan a party or to know when you need to go stay with Martha, because her wisdom teeth are coming out on the 17th, and she'll need help for a couple of days, but you'll have to take a break in the afternoon to get James from the airport on the 19th because he's flying back in from Bangladesh.... Now, let's imagine that your loved ones are writing down important days in their Day Timers or appointment books or even on little pink Post-It notes, but they're not conveying these dates and appointments and whatnot onto the master calendar. Suddenly, Evan is calling you wondering why you didn't come to his one-man show, and you notice that it wasn't on the master calendar and he's all "but it was in my BlackBerry!" Now, imagine that each of these unmarked appointments costs several thousand dollars each to remedy and throws off everything else in the calendar when they get forgotten or missed or not coordinated--that's what working in CAD and not transferring the design decisions into Revit does to a project.

I don't know how much more Guy has to work with Shaggy and Scrappy up there, but I'm sure the end will come not a moment too soon.

The further adventures of Scooby Doo & Associates

Lawd, y'all, Guy climbed into the car this afternoon fit to bust. He had just gotten off of a long conference call with the two designers from Scooby Doo & Associates, and he had a story to tell.

"So, these guys send me some wall sections along with the enlarged elevations that the wall sections belong to,right?" Guy begins. "First of all, I wish they'd mentioned this, because I'd already started working through the wall sections myself. But anyway, they worked through 'em, drew 'em up, and sent them to me so we could discuss them in our phone conference today."

Note: a wall section is just what it sounds like. It's like cutting a slice through the exterior wall of a building and looking inside, like "Body Worlds" but with a building instead of a person. That way, the contractor can see how tall everything should be and what's inside the wall and how we're keeping water out of it and how to make it stand up and so on. They're typical on EVERY architecture project that involves an exterior wall.

"So," I asked. "How did the call go?"

"Ohh, my God," Guy said, barely able to stifle a laugh. "These guys, they kept talking about how exhausted they were, exhausted from working out--"

"Exhausted from working out a couple of typical wall sections?!" I interrupted.

Guy broke into a full-on guffaw. "Exactly! Exhausted from figuring out the details that we do on a regular basis! Typical wall sections!"

"And they're 'exhausted' from doing this because they've been actually having to think--"

"--yeah! EXACTLY! Having to think! Thiiiiink about how buiiiiiiildings go togeeeeeeetherrrrrr!" Guy finished while slapping the car's dashboard.

I nearly ran over a bicyclist, I was laughing so hard. "So, how were the wall sections?" I finally asked.

"Well," Guy replied, "I give them credit for a good attempt."

"So...they weren't--"

"They weren't even right, not even close in some areas. Whoever drew them, I give them credit for trying, but mostly because it gives me something to start with and correct and I don't have to start from scratch, but they weren't very right."

"Awww," I gushed as if I were talking to my cats. "Shumwun dwew a waww seck-shun! Aw, puddin', dat's sho shweet!"

I mentioned the first SD&A story to Bosley recently, and he told me that his experience with big-name/starchitect firms had been similar for almost his entire 30-year career. Back in the 1980s, he and Design Associates worked with a big-name firm in Chicago as part of a joint venture. He and a colleague went to this Big Firm to do some planning for a hospital, and then when it came time to sketch up some options for the hospital's master planning options, it seemed as if Big Firm's people were stuck. How would they ever get all this drawn up and done? Bosley and his colleague said, "Give us some trace paper and round up some markers, and we'll sketch this up in a couple of hours." The Big Firm employees--and managers and VPs--seemed stunned that anyone could put the mental energy into something, be efficient and effective, and figure. things. out.

"Then," Bosley recounted with a devilish smirk, "we needed to make copies of the sketches to distribute to the hospital's board for a meeting the next morning, and these Big Firm guys were just hemming and hawing, like 'oh, how are we going to get these copies done? there's a lot to do here, and the copy shop is in the other building across town that Big Firm owns, oh no...' so over lunch, we just grabbed the sketches, found another kinda-large architecture firm in town, asked if we could talk to their in-house copy center guy, and we asked him if he'd make all our copies for us for $20, and he said yes."

"That was a lot of cash in the '80s!" I exclaimed.

"Yeah, and he took it and did the copies for us," Bosley said. "By the time we got back to Big Firm's office, they were still panicking a bit about getting the copies made, and we just said, 'yeah, we went and got them done.' And they were stunned that you--that anyone--could just..." He waved his hands a bit. "...get things done!"

Evidently, there's less thing-getting-doneing going on in the world these days. My healthcare colleagues and I at Design Associates get stuff done, and we're finding that a lot of other firms--and people--just don't. Contigo Architects, with whom I'm working on Frontier County Hospital, seems like they drag their feet a bit and don't just sit down, think something through, and solve it. Is it that hard to just figure stuff out? I mean, yes there are people with cognitive disorders now and again but seriously, is it that hard to sit down and work stuff out? Holla back, my people--is this what you experience as well?

Retarditecture

I don't talk much about what my husband, Guy, and his firm do. However, the following story warrants repeating, with identifying details left out, of course. The firm at which Guy works, Acme Architects, Inc., has offices in several cities in the country, and they work on some pretty high profile stuff. On a mixed-use project that Guy is on, Acme has teamed with a really high-profile architecture firm. I mean, a name you might know from newspapers (and all my architect readers would know the name for sure). What happens on some projects is that one firm does the initial design and then passes it off to another, local firm that finishes the design and works out all the construction details. In this case, Guy's firm would be inheriting the design from this big-name firm, and he was excited to work with them. He might get to go to New York to meet with the designers on the project and even meet the high-profile well-known architect who runs the firm. Very cool.

It is at this point that I will name the high-profile firm "Scooby-Doo & Associates." There's a good reason for this.

Here's a little fact for you: three courses (rows) of standard brick are 8" high (including mortar joints), and three bricks in a row are 24" long (again, including mortar joints). Hence, we try really really really really hard to make sure a building's dimensions "course out", or that the heights between things like tops of doors and bottoms of windows are evenly divisible by 8" and the distance plan-wise between things like door frames and column bump-outs are divisible by 12" (you can cut a brick in half or hide half of it in a corner, trust me). This makes coursing easy, which makes construction and fabrication easy. The less your masons have to cut bricks, the less time and expense goes into your construction. (Remember: in the U.S., labor is more expensive than supplies.)

So, Guy gets SD&A's initial design for the building last month. It has a stone and brick exterior, a stone base with brick up top. Since most of the building is brick, you want to make sure that the pieces of stone course out, right? Mm-mm, not the fine designers at Scooby-Doo & Associates. Each of the stone units is 10.25" high. That courses out to Jack Squat. Frickin' ridiculous. Guy calls them last month--yes, a month ago--and tells them that in his review of their magnificent design, he noticed that the stone base units don't course out. Finally, a month later, this past Monday, he had to bring it to their attention again. They finally looked at the problem, realized Guy was right...and then told him that they would need a week to come up with a good solution.

Um...what?

Guy was blown away by this. "These fuckin' high-designer types," he mused, annoyed. "They have no idea how a building actually goes together. I mean, seriously. This is just one of several things I've found wrong in their drawings. And it took them a month to confront the reality of that! And it'll take them another week for them to 'assess' the design and 'figure out a solution'. It doesn't take that long to recourse your stone units. Jesus!"

"How can they not know how to put together a building?" I mused.

"Because," Guy responded, "a high-end design firm rarely if ever takes a design all the way through to completion, and detailing a building for construction documents and then having to monitor its construction teaches you how a building actually goes together. And these guys never get that experience. So they're really good at making buildings look good and cool and interesting, but they don't know shit about how it actually gets built."

"So," I mused again, "you're Velma and they're Daphne." Guy chuckled in agreement.

Look, I've met some architects and designers who worked for really high-end firms, and some of them know just how a building goes together. But others don't. That's the down side of being a really good designer--you get so good at making things look awesome that you never learn how to make things work. And in order to get licensed, you have to know how to put a building together. But if you're a good designer, you can get paid serious mad cash to make things pretty, therefore there's no impetus to get licensed. And in my cheesy li'l opinion, that makes you only half an architect. Earn your hours and credits, get the experience, take the tests, and get the license.

Let's just hope they don't turn into Scrappy-Doo before the end of the project.

The Gropius Coop (for a new WAD reader)

So I got an email a couple of weeks ago from Jon, who lives in a house designed by members of Walter Gropius' office The Architects' Collaborative.  Jon wants to get four chickens and build a coop for them himself on his historically significant and sacred property, so his chicken coop can't be a) huge, b) glaring and obscene, c) hard to build, and d) cutesy-pie.  While looking for a Modern chicken coop design, he stumbled across my tripe of a blog.  Bless his heart.

So he found this post and or this post and/or this post about starchitects' chicken coops, and he emailed me with his sketches of the coop he'd like to build.  May I say that it was a good sketch, and with a little staring at it over a cup of tepid coffee, I figured out what he was trying to do.  What I got from Jon's sketches is that something the size of a 4'x8' sheet of plywood is about as big as he wants to handle, but the coop also needs to be off the ground and have defensible space, what with the small predators around his house.

I asked Jon if I could try to do my own sketch for his Bauhaus-inspired coop, and to my delight he said yes.  So, here's my Brrkhaus.

The exterior includes lap siding and a cantilevered roof made of two 4'x8' sheets of plywood and a little wooden trim on the edges.  To match Jon's house, I've included two 2x4s standing on end as a vertical element to allude to Jon's chimney.  4x4s support the chicken wire that makes up the chicken run.  I can't decide if I should include some more lap siding along the far end of the run to evoke Jon's house as well.  (Jon, can I put your house on WAD?  It's so completely awesome, and your photo of it does it justice.)  Strip windows on one or both long sides allows light in, and a sliding panel allows Jon access to the eggs.  Let's have a look inside, shall we? 

 Inside, we can see the 4x4 columns (at the edges of the structure, no less--go Mies!) and the 2x4s providing lateral support and a material for tacking the chicken wire floor to the building.  The underpinning panel flips up toward the outside and will allow Jon to rake the poo out from under it.  The sliding panel at the bottom of the occupiable enclosure slides up and is held up by a hook (or something, I haven't worked it out yet), which allows Jon to get eggs from the nests without bugging the hens too much.

I'm wondering about the dimensions I'm showing on the drawings.  Kitty, when you get back from Nash Vegas, would you mind commenting on how big Jon's coop should be for four chickens?  I'm thinking it should be around 3'x7' max.

Michael Graves is in a wheelchair and he can still kick your ass

Longtime WAD readers know that I've taken some shots at Michael Graves before.  (I've done it here, for example)  But I keed beecauzze I luuvv.  I like his stuff in general, especially his industrial design stuff.  I got an email recently from Healthcare Design Magazine noting that Michael Graves will be the keynote speaker at their conference this November in Orlando.  The profile of Graves talks about the awards that His Kitschiness has received and the services his various firms offer, and then it says:

In 2003, a sudden illness left him paralyzed from the waist down. Now confined to a wheelchair, Graves' designs continue to combine simple utility, functional innovation, and formal beauty with his now deeper understanding of the importance of accessibility and patient-centered design in the healthcare sector. Five years after the illness that changed him forever, Graves and his team are hard at work on many healthcare design projects, including a line of home healthcare products that fuse one-dimensional medical utility with style, multifunctional elegance, and beauty.

“We are delighted and honored to have someone of Michael Graves' stature to keynote this event," says Debra Levin, President and CEO of The Center. “Michael's stated design philosophy — that healthcare settings need to serve those who work and receive care in them — is very much in alignment with The Center's mission to transform healthcare environments through design research. We look forward to what we know will be an engaging, dynamic, not-to-be-missed keynote presentation that will set the tone for the rest of the event."

What?  In a wheelchair?  Good Gawd!  I suppose it's unfortunate for him (but certainly not the worst thing that could happen to him--at least he didn't have a stroke or something), but it's really a gift for the healthcare design world.  Like him or not, Graves has a way with industrial (objects) design and graphic (print) design that is unique and arguably revolutionary.  I like his stuff, and so do a crapload of people who shop at Target.  Michael Graves entrance into the healthcare design world (even if it's Chevy Chase-like and inadvertent) means introducing new design style and taste to a clientele that is generally (in my experience) averse to anything "design-y".  As I've described in an earlier post, the first task of a healthcare facility is to function so that caring for and healing patients happens efficiently and effectively.  Pretty takes a backseat to functional in a healthcare facility, and it usually gets felt up in that back seat.

So His Kitschiness is about to be His Clinically Usefulness.  Righteous.  Let the healing begin, my people.  But let me open the question to the people: have you ever used any Michael Graves-designed stuff, and how well did it work?  What would you love to see him (re)design?  (Other than a chicken coop?)