The worst architect in the world

Nope, it's not Frank Lloyd Wright, nor is it Peter Eisenmann. (zing!) It's this brilliant Old Spice commercial. See if you can figure out all the horrible, tragic mistakes he's made in his house in the last scene.

Didn't I already talk to you people?

Last week was meetings and finding just how many holes there were in our drawings, punctuated by a trip to Biefee, MT meet with some smaller groups of St. Ermahgerd's users. One of the biggest problems we've had with the St. Ermahgerd project is insufficient user group meetings, and it continues to plague us. Generally speaking, we meet with the user groups (the people who will actually use the building, usually grouped by department) during schematic design (SD) and design development (DD). We might have a couple of user group meetings during construction documents (CDs) to discuss special equipment issues, but that's it.

Last week's meetings happened seven weeks after we issued CDs. And the users even asked, "so when are you coming back, Pixie?"

Never, if I have my way about it. But having my way on this matter is about as likely as getting a unicorn to shit in my coffee every morning: not too likely. So, I'll probably have to go back at some point, even though we shouldn't. 

Yet we should. The project kept getting stopped and started over the course of 2012, so the user group meetings kept getting canceled and moved and canceled and moved, hence we never got the full, proper input we needed from the users in a timely fashion. And you have to give users their time--they don't read architectural drawings and understand space the way we do, so they need a certain amount of time and repeat visits to have these conversations and understand what they're getting. And you can't do that in the number of meetings we had. So,we're having to do all these meetings now. And they're still incomplete, and I still feel like I'm about to give these poor people a bad hospital, though God I hope not.

So I'm praying that we have the right information and our professional experience will be adequate to fill in the gaps in this project left behind by the lack of user group meetings. And I'm praying for that unicorn to show up as well.

OPP (Other People's Problems)

I've continued to ponder on Jimmy Ray's comment a few weeks ago when he observed that I was doing three different roles on St. Ermahgerd. The staffing on this project has been problematic for a long time; even a year ago, Howie confided to me that the project was understaffed and had been for a while. On the Uber MOB I did 18-24 months ago, which was of a similar size and complexity as St. Ermahgerd, we had two architects and four interns working on just the interior architecture. St. Ermahgerd in contrast had me and two interns for most of the project, and then we picked up another architect (actually, we stole him from the St. Ermahgerd exterior team) to help during late DDs. 

Further complicating matters is that the St. Ermahgerd schedule kept stopping and then starting with a vengeance, so we'd suddenly have a lot of floor plan changes plus a fast deadline.  We didn't have enough people to make these deadlines, to make the plan changes, and to add in all the additional bits of information and details that make a set of DDs look like DDs. Hence, our DDs were really more like 50% DDs, and we then had two months to take 180,000 sf of building from 50% DDs to 100% CDs.  (We usually get about four months for CDs on a project of this size and complexity.) In order to make this even kinda sorta happen, I was having to scramble to find staff to help us during the week, on the weekends, after hours, whenever and wherever we could. Instead of working on redlines and specs, I was having to find staff  I also had to match the available and willing staff up with tasks that they could do in the time they had available--I had some experienced folks and newbies, and we kept finding that unfinished tasks tended to remain unfinished.

Even more difficult was that Chloe was clearly pregnant, and there seemed to be no strategy in place to fill in for her while she was out for three months with a newborn. I have to wonder if perhaps that the plan was that either my other architect or me were expected to be this person, but both of us are technically planners, not project architects--we need to be available for the next project coming down the pipeline, not stuck doing CA for the next 15 months. The fellow who ended up filling in for Chloe started at Design Associates five weeks after Chloe went on maternity leave, so I'm still getting calls and emails because I've had to be Chloe and me for a month.

I'm at the point where I hate having to do anything on St. Ermahgerd, even if what's being asked of me is perfectly reasonable. I'm worn down from having to make all the decisions on everything. Thank heavens that some other architects in the office have been answering questions regarding the exterior RFIs and shop drawings, because I really can't make those decisions, having not worked on the exterior (that was Chloe, who God bless her is still taking my occasional emails regarding questions on this project while being sleep-deprived and nursing a baby). It's like when you get barfing drunk on tequila, and then you get nauseous when you just see a bottle of tequila on a shelf. That's how I feel about St. Ermahgerd  when I even think about it--nausea.

With T minus 96 hours to go

The equipment consultant is useless, the guy redlining the exterior details has taken a computer off of an empty desk and holed up in a conference room, the owner won't send me information about all their owner-supplied-contractor-installed equipment, the IT consultant keeps emailing me about the MOB (we're starting on that on Tuesday! Did you finish the hospital yet? Well then get back there and finish the hospital! If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding!), the owner's rep keeps emailing my staff for random floor plans and information...

...and my co-project manager/architect/right hand woman is having to work from home, because she's starting to have weird pre-labor pains.  Did I mention Chloe was pregnant?  She is, and any day now she won't be any more.  Right in time for the deadline.

Really? Again?! Are you kidding me?!?!

Both Hazel and Gracie went to the vet last week for a routine checkup and teeth cleaning. Everyone's blood work and urine came out fine, though the vet found a little lump/mass of tissue on Gracie's lower gums. She removed it easily during the dental cleaning and sent it off for a histology report.

It came back as low-grade fibrosarcoma.

Great. Now I have another cat with cancer.

So this week, we'll go visit the veterinary oral surgeon and talk about how much of Gracie's gum and lower jaw may need to be removed to make sure we get all the cancer cells. Supposedly, this surgeon is really good, and she won't look terrible or really really different after the surgery, but I'd like to see some before and after pictures. After surgery, we'll probably have to do some kind of follow-up treatment. I gave Maddy chemo pills for almost 18 months when she had small-cell lymphosarcoma during 2008-2010. Funny now that I think about it, Maddy finally crossed the Rainbow Bridge last week in 2010.

Thanks, Universe. Appreciate the hell out of this.

Wat? Ai no haz cansurr, just a hungree.  Ware iz tuna, mama?

Guy and I leave for Vegas later this week for our 8th anniversary weekend with Scarlett and Baxter and all the bad kittehs at their house.  Gracie will be fine for the duration, I'm sure.  I'm sure Hazel, the angry 15-year-old ball of chorb, will have the worst time of it at home with the Psycho Floof while Mama and Papa are off cavorting.

Attempting to slow down

So, yeah, I haven't posted lately.  I've been working a lot and worn out.

No, not worn out, exhausted.

No, not exhausted, depleted.

2012 has been brutal in terms of workload and schedule. More work, less real architecture, some issues with management, and spending each day looking into the mirror and being faced with nothing but my own shortcomings.  The fast schedule and massive size of St. Ermahgerd doesn't help, but the fact that we can't seem to get the info and decisions we need from the client is compounding the problem.  Further, the health system of which St. Ermahgerd is part (aka, the people who come up with the construction money) have added a design and construction person to the project who seriously doesn't know what the fuck he's doing.  I wish I had a more diplomatic way of describing the situation, but I don't.  The things that come out of this person's mouth tells me that his understanding of what the engineers, contractors, and I do every day is about as deep as someone who watched a hospital get built once or twice while making coffee. He might have well watched a weekend marathon of TLC's Trading Spaces for the amount of help he's shaping up to be.

So right now, I'm sick of being an architect.  Not that I want to change careers--I just don't want to be an architect for a while, maybe the week between Christmas and New Year's.  I think that might help me feel a little better.  

I hope all of you have a great holiday season, and I'll post more (hopefully) next year after I've had a break.  Word, and peace!

I could do my work if it wasn't for my job

My suspicions were recently confirmed about my workload as an associate: it includes lots of meetings and lots of things that barely have anything to do with architecture. I spent my first two weeks trying to get caught up on St. Ermahgerd while scheduling and sitting through employee reviews. Over the course of those reviews, it came to light that there were some serious issues still with Prudence's management of the interior designers. There were some meltdowns and hissy fits, (several of which were justified, in my mind), and several folks made counteroffers to their proposed raises.  Meanwhile, the associates kept not meeting for their weekly get-together with the partners because we were trying to get reviews done.  By the time we had an associates' meeting again, I missed it for being in an actual project meeting. 

Longtime readers of WAD know how much I hate meetings.  I. Fucking. HATE. Meetings.  Meetings are events where people take minutes and waste hours.  Things don't really get done in meetings, and I base the quality of my day on how much useful activity and tasks I've actually accomplished, not talked about.  To me, an ideal meeting is 20 minutes long, decisions are made, and everyone leaves with one or more tasks to complete.  The meetings I've been getting pulled into over and over lately are 30-60 minutes long, and I'm not sure everyone's leaving with a clear direction of what we're all supposed to do. Many of the meetings I've ended up in don't have a focus or start ping-ponging around in terms of topics--it's just a recitation of the latest brain droppings or panic from the latest shitstorm that has brewed.

The sad truth about white-collar work is that the better you get at your job, the higher you rise in the ranks, and the more meetings you attend.  The sad truth about architecture as a profession is that, more often than not, the better you are at it, the less you actually get to do it. So now, instead of working on planning and programming and healthcare and life safety codes for 42 hours a week and healthcare studio development 1-3 hours a week, I work on planning for 36 hours a week and sitting through exhausting-ass meetings 6 hours a week.  And I can't daydream off in these meetings at least for a few minutes at a time, like in a project meeting when the engineers start talking about VAV boxes--these are meetings where I have to focus and listen to stuff I don't care about, just in case someone says something that I care like hell about.  So at the end of 90 minutes, I'm exhausted and irritated, which is not a good combination.

I suppose my next challenge is to figure out how to steward my energy better. I'm just getting 6-6.5 hrs of sleep a night right now, which clearly isn't good for me and isn't allowing me to rest properly.  It's interesting that my next challenge/goal/achievement actually has to do not with doing something but with not doing something--just resting.

Monday Visual Inspiration: Delusions of grandeur in Cherry Creek North

While walking through Cherry Creek North recently, I discovered a detail on a recent building there that caused me to do a double take.  The building below was built in the last ten years (probably newer than that), but it was the feature over the large window on the right that gave me pause.

Um, is that the hand of God and Adam touching each other, resplendent in stucco, or--God forbid--EIFS?  And what image is on those diamond-shaped medallions?

Oh good Lord.  It's da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, immortalized in some sort of bronze plating or cast stone.  And there's a little security camera to catch the faces of anyone who dares pause at this capitalist edifice and ponder the possible meaning of plastering Renaissance imagery on what is essentially a high-end strip mall near downtown Denver.

I like art.  I like capitalism. I like brokerage firms and restaurants.  I like da Vinci. I like Cherry Creek North.  I even like stucco.  I do not like them all lumped together as an attempt to prettify or even legitimize a 21st-century building with 17th-century artistic references.  Be modern and be proud.

Monday Visual Inspiration: Vulgar display of power outlets

First of all, I really like the coffee shop in which I took these photos.  I like their food and coffee, the decor is great, and the environment overall is great.  It's a fantastic place to people watch, have a great, locally-sourced snack, read or work quietly, or hang out with friends. Below is an art wall towards the back of the coffee shop. I love these laminate panels with exposed fasteners (note to self: find out what these are made of and put them in a future hospital), and I love that the art is the same size as the panels.

Wait, what's that just above...right in those two panels...?

Are you kidding me?!  Are those power outlets??

Yes. Yes, those are poorly-located power outlets. This shop just renovated and did interior repairs due to a water main break, and yet no one fixed this?  No one moved these outlets, even to the middle of a panel where you could replace the stainless steel cover plates with white and kinda-sorta camouflage them?


*sigh* Can I get some Bailey's in my coffee?

The arc of justice is long, but it's wide. MLK Jr.

People, I never thought I'd see the day when I would type or utter the following words.


Gregg is leaving Design Associates.


Yes, Gregg, who was mentioned as being a nuisance and unsupportive to work with when the management consultant visited our office last year. Gregg, the do-nothing manager who is the reason Guy left DA almost six years ago. Gregg's last day will be sometime in early June, or so it has been said by two separate people in our office, and then confirmed by Norman, an associate at DA.  


No word on why.  No word on where he's going.  (The scuttlebutt is that he's going to be a sole practitioner, which makes sense given that I doubt any firm would have him or keep him for more than a few months after they realize how unhelpful he tends to be.)  But after several people complained about him in the management survey, an admin person refused to work with him, and another quit rather than work with him, I think it became clear that it was time for him to go.  He could leave easy, or he could leave hard.  Looks like he chose easy.  No surprise there.


More scuttlebutt and updates to come.  I'm trying to get a deadline handled for next week, and I'm worn slap out.

Monday Visual Inspiration: The hazards of building to the lot line

Yikes.

Municipalities provide property owners with rules on how far back from their property lines they're allowed to build. Sometimes, they're allowed to build all the way up to the property line, maybe on the sides of the lot. This is sometimes called "zero lot line". But as my old pal Sarge says, just because you can doesn't mean you should.

The baby with the bathwater

Longtime friend, colleague, and DA associate Norman informed me that his and my desks were some of the messiest in the office, and that "someone" wanted to move us to a less-visible place in the office so that our mess was not so easily seen by visitors to our firm. That "someone" turned out to be Prudence, head of interior design and owner of one of the most hideously-disorganized desks the office has ever seen. I was, needless to say, furious at this news/judgment, and Norman himself wasn't particularly pleased either.

"I bought us a chance to not move," said Norman after a facility committee meeting. "I got everyone to agree that you and I would clean our desks in the next week to a level that was more acceptable."

"Whether you and I move or just clean, the problem is the same," I fumed. "We need time to clean, and we need to make sure we actually have somewhere to put all this shit when we clean or file or throw away or whatever!"

I've been slammed busy since August of 2010, with at least one deadline a week of some sort or another, and Norman has been one or two deadlines a week for the past two-plus years. If you want me to have a clean desk, relieve me of the pressure of my workloads and deadlines, or at least explain to my bosses-all three of them--that I won't be getting their billable work done for the next three or four hours because I'm cleaning in order to placate the capricious needs of someone who doesn't sit anywhere near me, someone whom I in fact very rarely see in my part of the office. Furthermore, if we don't have somewhere to put the boxes I'm filing, or if we don't have big-ass empty recycle bins for the mounds of papers I'm recycling, then it doesn't do much good for me to clean, does it?

I did a little cleaning on Friday, and I approached Howie with a stack of folders with meeting notes and various ephemera from projects dating back to 2007. "Howie, what should I do with all this?" I asked. Howie replied that I would need to go through it and scan what needed to stay, then chuck everything once it was scanned. I then fumed that I didn't have that kind of time, and he sighed.

"We don't have time to be cleaning," he said wearily. "We have work to do." I told him that he was preaching to the choir, but that I was cleaning because someone felt that my desk was offensive to God and humankind and was so dreadful to behold that it frightened children and bruised fruit by its mere existence. Howie waved his hand dismissingly at the accusation. "We're too busy to be messing with that," he replied. "I need your help with this program..."

I then realized that it was perhaps unlikely that I would be moved anytime soon. Yes, I sit in a very visible place in the office, but I also sit in direct eyesight of Howie. If he and I stand up at our desks, we're practically staring at each other about 15 or 20 feet apart. Howie needs to be able to see the people upon which he most relies so that he can say aloud, "So-and-so, I need your help with X and Y for the next hour" and make it so. If I move now, I can only move closer to him--away is not an option.

And Howie outranks Prudence.

Monday Visual Inspiration: The tragedy of the poorly-planned toilet, Part 2

Poorly-designed toilet rooms make me sad. I'm sad because it's a waste of resources and building materials. I'm also sad because a poorly-designed toilet makes difficult for some of us the most basic and private of functions: going to the bathroom. Below is yet another example of an improperly-designed/built toilet room (photos taken at a gas station toilet room outside Estes Park, CO). Comments are below each photo.

Over and over, I see the same error: add some grab bars and the toilet room is now "accessible". There's nothing farther from the truth. Making a toilet room ADA compliant involves a series of space and fixture layouts and dimensions of various accessories in relation to each other and to the floor. The above shot shows some of these problems: the toilet paper dispenser is way too high above the grab bar, and the sink is located within the required clear space of the toilet. Also, the seat cover dispenser is way too high and it's above the toilet--both are no-no's. Further, the trashcan (albeit movable) is located within the toilet's clearspace. If you come in here in a wheelchair, pray you can roll up and hoist thyself onto the throne.

Here's the door from inside the toilet. The pull on the door is okay--it doesn't require grabbing, twisting, or pinching--but there's a metal box of some sort that seems to be in the way of the required 18" clear space on the pull side of the door. But what about that little locking mechanism above the pull handle? Well, it does require grasping, pinching, and twisting, which is not ADA compliant.

Mom is standing by the door to make another point about the door lock. Mom is 5'-4.5", so the door lock is maybe 8"-9" below Mom's head, making it about 56" above the floor. Unobstructed forward reach for someone in a wheelchair is 15"-48" above the floor, which means that not only is this door lock hard to operate if your hands are incapacitated in some way, but you'll have a tough row to hoe in your in a wheelchair and you pop in here for a quick dooky.

But it was a bargain!

Seen in the parking lot of the Mud Volcano Geyser area.

"Look, Debbie, I know it doesn't quite fit the truck, but it was only $20! And just think--when we sleep in back while we're camping, we can just hang our butts over the tail gate and go pee! No shoes required!"