Monday Visual Inspiration: Goldfield Hotel in Goldfield, Nevada

I first heard of the Goldfield Hotel in Goldfield, NV on a show called Ghost Adventures on Travel Channel. Three guys from Las Vegas investigate potential paranormal activity at various locations while being locked in them overnight. They got their show through a two-hour documentary that culminated in filming a flying brick in the basement of the Goldfield Hotel. Those last few moments of the show are worth finding on YouTube if you can--it's two of the three guys talking while holding the camera, and then the brick flies across the room, then it's just darkness and the two guys screaming and uttering "Jesus!" over and over for five minutes.  They eventually jumped out of a second-story window to get out of the building into which they had begged to be locked a few hours before.

The building is closed to tours and the public. It's creepy as hell.

Monday Visual Inspiration: Cleanup on aisle five...

Remember this excellent sign from an earlier post?

It was in the door of a Cherry Creek North coffee shop, which is located in a building that had a major water main break. They used the same trademark humor in their signage regarding the incident.

Monday Visual Inspiration: Castle WTF

"They told me I could be anything I wanted, so I became every house I'd ever seen in Capitol Hill."

This multifamily building in Cap Hill is the Nicki Minaj of the neighborhood, this post-modern residence with its quasi-historical context. There are three front doors to the units in this, the street-facing facade. There is brick. There is "stone". There is wood. There is stucco. There are wood columns holding up "stone" turrets, which is a slap in the face of architectural history, building science, physics, and God Him/Herself. Wood does not hold up stone, unless it's heavy timber in a medieval castle in Scotland, and this ain't Scotland.

There are low-profile "storefront"-ish windows in the left turret, and there are wood operable windows in the upper floors, and there are "leaded" stained glass windows in the lower floors, and there are picture windows and bay windows. There are curves and haunches and "stonework" over the doors and "cast iron" lights outside, and ornamental metal fencework. This building reminds me of my sophomore year of design school, when inevitably a professor regards a project with bemused congeniality and tells the hapless design student: "You have a long career ahead of you, both in school and in the profession--you don't have to use all your good ideas in one project." I like every piece of this building; I just don't like them all together in one place at one time. Even beyond the aesthetic, there is the problem of forgetting and/or misunderstanding architectural history (certain kinds of materials don't belong with certain types of architecture--it's anachronistic) and building science (when you hold up stone with some 6" wooden columns, we know it's either not real wood or not real stone).

I'm of two minds when I critique buildings like this. One is that I'm sure people could shred my buildings if they saw them and had the inclination to do so, so who am I to be Miss High and Mighty Architectural Critic? On the other hand, buildings are not like paintings in a museum that I can avoid, or restaurants that I don't have to eat at, or songs I don't have to listen to or buy, or books that I don't have to read--we cannot avoid the built environment so easily as we can these smaller yet no-less-influential works of art. Someone lives across from this building and must look at it every time they check to see if it's snowing, every time they answer the door, every time they take the dog out for walkies and pee. We have to look at this architectural mash-up every time we drive down this street and be overwhelmed by its indecision, its design-by-committeeness, its look-at-me aesthetic.

That being said, I want the unit that gets the balcony with the nautilus-shell-like curve.

Monday Visual Inspiration: Oops.

A short one today, folks, but it involves indulging in one of my guilty pleasures: looking at building and construction mistakes and repairs. If it's bad enough to grab my attention, I'm whipping out the camera, or at the very least I'm calling my husband's attention to it so we can be catty about it and figure out if it's poorly-built, not thought out, whatever. Join me for a turn in the litter box, won't you?

This is in the stairwell of my favorite just-renovated library, and I have to wonder how this got missed. Did they forget that the wall base needs to terminate into something? It's just hanging here at the top of the stair stringer, like an unreturned high-five at a Super Bowl party. If you insist on using wall base in the stairwell, it would have been better to find some small, super-lo profile moulding or wall base to do the job, instead of slapping some Johnsonite around the edge of the landing and hoping no one will notice. Mm-mm-mm. [shakes head, sips riesling from wine glass]

Eeek. What happened here? I feel like I remembered seeing a big crack in the stucco on this wall a while back, so maybe this is where it was fixed. Thing is, stucco has integral color--it's already colored when it goes on the wall, so it's not something that you paint after you've installed it. Unfortunately, the new stucco is a different color than the existing stucco, and everyone driving by can see it. I'm not aware of stucco having fading issues in the light (architects who are WAD fans, do you know? I don't put a lot of stucco in my projects), and besides, this is on a north wall, so there shouldn't be a lot of direct UV rays on this wall. They might have to do a surface painting of this side, like it or not. [takes a couple of sips from glass of riesling]

Oh Lawd. [gulps riesling, asks for another glass]

I have no idea what in the name of Mario Botta happened here. I imagine this was a tuckpointing job gone wrong. (Tuckpointing is the process of removing/replacing/repairing the mortar between bricks.) Here's why I'm especially alarmed: see those bricks inside the wall? That tells me that this house has a lot of age on it, and the building made it a double-wythe (at least) exterior wall. Back in the day, baking and curing bricks was harder than it is today in terms of getting a consistently strong and well-cured product. Depending on where a brick was in the kiln, it might not fully cure, plus the little old kilns of the turn of the last century couldn't get as hot as the kilns of the last 50 or so years. Why does this matter for this poor homeowner? It means that the softer, less-strong bricks are on the inside of the exterior wall, and now that they're exposed to the weather, they may absorb a bunch of moisture that may be hard pressed to get back out of the wall once they brick it back up.

More riesling, please!

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...

Eye of the beholder, Part 2

So I was musing on my new high school building here in Part 1, and as longtime readers of WAD might expect, I diaspprove like a rabbit. However, I'm trying to check my self-righteous archifury as best I can. Problem is, just like the disapproving rabbits, I feel so much disdain...for mehchitecture.

Mehchitecture is the best way I can describe the bland, uncreative buildings and sites and you and I see on a regular basis. It's generally every strip mall and big box store you've seen, it's every chain store you've seen, every fast food joint, and more and more, it's every commercial building and office park you've seen. Strip windows. Stucco. Or worse, EIFS. A slightly angled canopy over the entry. A little barrel vaulting going on over part of the building. Yeah, okay. It feels like no one's even trying anymore. And by no one, I mean my fellow architects. It's our job to push the envelope with forms, materials, structure. It's our job to ask clients over and over again, "Is this how you work now, or is this how you want to work?" It's our job to look at whatever pissant town we're designing for and look for inspiration, for things and forms and colors and materials and ideas that help us design a building that looks interesting and fresh and yet timeless and yet fits into the context. That's a tall order. But that's why we go to school for 5+ years and practice for years and years before we get to take a much of tests and practice on our own, and we still never get it fully right. We learn on each project, but we forget it is also our job as architects to teach, to introduce our clients to something more, something better. You can have it so much better, we tell them. Look how much better this can look, how much more efficiently it can function, how easy it will be to expand when the time comes, when you do what we're suggesting. If I can't give my clients something better than a cruddy brick chunk with a huge gabled roof that's out of place on the building type, then why even waste the 7% to hire me?

Here's where I have to give my old high school some credit. They look like they spent some money on the interior, not blinging but rather pleasant. They used some creativity to make the dollaz go farther. But that's the point, isn't it? It's easy to make a building look badass when you have mad-crazy money; the challenge is how nice can you make a building look--and how durable and well-built is it--for what little you have? Let me say that I've been in a similar position on a hospital, where we cut landscaping dollars so that we can make the building's inside and outside look good and function well. Still, you can do a lot of really cool things with brick and metal trusses in order to make a building look really cool for little to no cost compared to doing something bland-looking.

I also appreciate the fact that they slightly overbuilt for now so that they can grow into the building(s). When I graduated from Booger County in 1994, we had about 600 students in grades 6-12 on our campus. Now, this campus is preparing to have as many as 1,500 kids grades 9-12 on the campus, and good on them. In healthcare architecture, we frequently design buildings and additions so that the facility can add on easily in the future, and they appreciate that. I've built shell space into several hospitals so that when they were ready, they could build up walls and doors and just connect to the plumbing lines that we'd already run in the slab. I don't know how my old school overbuilt for the future, but I applaud them. I also appreciate that they at least "splurged" on things like smartboards in the classrooms. Here's hoping that everyone embraces the technology.

But...here's a li'l story to help illustrate the reason that the appearance of the school disturbs me most. Diane Travis (who is an epic genius) of the Rocky Mountain Masonry Institute once told us a story of a county government that was trying to stop graffiti in their low-income housing neighborhood. They started talking to Diane about different coatings that they could put on their next low-income building's masonry exterior to keep graffiti from sticking. Diane then asked them what the planned exterior of this building was, and the county project manager informed her that it was CMU. That's right--concrete block for the exterior of this housing project building. Diane said (and I love her for this), "Well no wonder people are spray painting your buildings--they look awful. They look like highway underpasses, utility buildings, forgotton places. People don't take care of things that look like crap." For a very comparable cost, she showed them some other exterior masonry cladding options, such as split-face CMUs and bricks made of colored concrete. And guess what? The new, nicer-looking but not-any-more-expensive building never got tagged.

My hope for my new high school building is that the students feel good in that building, that they feel valued. I hope that they enjoy their new building and understand on some level what the Booger County school board was trying to do: give them a better place to learn so that they might be better prepared for the future. I fear that the mehchitecture that has been perpetrated on them might backfire, that new will not necessarily translate into nice. But I hope they'll have the sense to know that a) the school board tried, and b) it can be so. much. better. They're just going to have to go find it.

Eye of the beholder, Part 1

Mom send me clippings from the local fishwrap--um, newspaper every now and then, and most recently she included an article about the new high school in Booger County, where I went to school. She sent me a picture of the computer rendering from the newspaper last year, and it looked...wretched. The computer rendering made it look like these poor Booger County kids were about to go to high school in a Dickensian 19th-century workhouse. Actually to say the large, super-simple, basic-gable roofed structure that appeared to be made of either brick and CMU (concrete blocks) or two colors of brick looked like a 19th-century factory would have been a compliment; brickwork from 100 years ago is absolutely amazing, even on the most mundane of buildings. Some of the brickwork on old warehouses in LoDo here in Denver is surprising and almost stunning when you think about what these buildings were supposed to do--today, these types of building have been replaced by all-metal tilt-up Butler buildings. So, yeah, the rendering not only looked really primitive (seriously, everyone reading this blog can download SketchUp and make a better rendering than what was printed in the paper), but it also looked drab, uninspiring, and horrible. "Are they getting the kids ready to go to prison?" I asked my mom. "Because if so, they'll feel right at home when they go to Reidsville [Georgia's state prison]."

So, Mom sends me the article about the new high school, a three-story structure that turned out to look marginally better than the rendering. It was slightly less-workhouse-looking, but still really pedestrian to the point of being completely unimaginative. The interior shot of the high school was simple but respectable--steel tube railings around a double-height space, VCT floors, and paint on the walls. I have to give the designers props for doing a three-color floor pattern in the atrium with VCT and using a darker paint color on the upper foot or so of the school's interior walls. Proof positive that you can do nice things with low-cost materials and make something look really good.

Which brings me back to the outside and the building as a whole. One of the students was quoted as saying that the new Booger County High School building might be the "nicest high school in the state of Georgia." I can flatly and without equivocation disagree. Just a few miles from my sister's house is Small Town High, which even at about 50 years old is a nicer looking building than the new BCHS. Guy commented, upon seeing the newspaper photos, that they probably had jack squat for a budget, and I'm betting he's right. But still, you can do really nice stuff with simple brick and trusses, people. I've seen interior designers make amazing things happen with VCT and a little sheet vinyl. Hell, you stain and seal plain old concrete and make it look high-end--check the floor of any Einstein's Bagels, or nearly any coffee shop for that matter.

At first, I questioned my reaction to the photos and the article: was I just being a elitist architectural jerk? Was I acting towards this new building the way the starchitects of the world react towards my simple little hospitals in rural Kansas? Maybe. I can't rule out that fact that I'm indulging in my all-purpose designer bitchitude. But here's why it broke my heart. That student the paper quoted was going on and on about how the school might be the nicest in Georgia, and how it's a highlight for Booger County and a model for other schools to follow, and all I can think is YOU CAN HAVE IT SO MUCH BETTER. I've built hospitals on shoestring budgets and still given them spaces that look beautiful, inspiring, uplifting, amazing. This building does not inspire me--it makes me feel even more "meh" than I used to when I looked at my old school building because it simply puts brick on a metal panel bus barn and calls it good. The forms are uninspiring, the use of materials is pedantic, and the whole thing looks from the outside like the school's board went into a coma in 1996 and just woke up, but the architects built them a building that looks like 1996 so they wouldn't be all shocked at how much time has passed, like an architectural version of GoodBye Lenin! I guess all the kids will be required to carry around Discmans that play Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch while they're at school, hiding their iPods and cell phones until they round the bend out of sight from the school. Sad.

As I read the student's comments, I thought to myself, "Of course you think it's gorgeous--if you're surrounded by nothing but Wal-Mart and trailers, this building is the frickin' Emerald City." I then thought back to my first year of architecture school at Georgia Tech, and I was amazed by all the really cool designs my fellow students came up with. How did they think that up? Where had they seen it? WTF? I often wondered to myself if my own designs were so normative and bland because I myself had grown up in a visually vanilla world. But at that moment I thought, "Why are we afraid to push these students, this town a little bit? Why are we afraid to give them a little more visual oomph? It feels like we're preparing these kids to never leave Booger County."

I'm not done mulling this topic over...

The agony of renovations (or, one of the reasons for this blog's name) part 2

So it gets better--this week I went with Bosley to an FCH meeting with the engineers and the architect of record for FCH. I may have explained this before, but here it is again: sometimes, two architects will join together as a joint venture or one will hire the other to work on a project. One firm will do the initial design, and the other one will take the design over and finish the construction documents and oversee construction. The first architect is the design architect, and the second is the architect of record. On FCH, we're working with Contigo Architects, whose office is only 45 minutes from FCH (while ours is about 4 hours away), and we have more experience in laying out hospitals than Contigo does. Hence, our roles are what they are.

I finally get to meet the architects I've only known as voices over the phone for four months, and we sit down to bidnazz. Part of the reason that we're meeting is to figure out how to get air into the newly-renovated surgery suite. We thought we could run some new ducts from a new small roof top unit (RTU), but the space between the underside of the structure and the top of the ceiling is too tight. From the floor of the building to the top of the roof deck is about 12 feet, and the structure is a 2.5" deep roof slab on 14" deep structure (cast in place concrete joists 24" o.c., for those of you keeping score at home). Plus, the roof structure is at different heights all over the roof, which is how they used to get a "flat" roof to slope so that you could shed water off of it to roof drains. Meanwhile, the ceiling in an operating room is ideally 10' high, but in order to get lights plus ducts in the ceiling space, we had to lower the OR ceilings to 9'-6". Furthermore, the structural engineer, who was present at the meeting helps us understand that at the lowest points in the roof structure, we would only have 6" between the ceiling and the bottom of structure, even with a 9'-6" ceiling. Really? Let's just send gnomes with fans up there to keep the place cool. Magic fairy dust will give us 25 air changes per hour! Ooh! And unicorns will keep the humidity between 40% and 60%--perfect conditions for doing a total hip replacement!

But that's not even the drinking-bingeworthy news. We had all decided earlier that we needed to create a mechanical penthouse thingy on the roof--this would hide and protect the ducts coming right out of the new mechanical unit, and they would go straight through the roof and into the ORs, no running long expanses of ducts underneath the supersnug structure. So we're all sitting around and working out how to do what and how to make it work and does this enclosure-thingy need to be rated or just insulated and if it's an attic then the IECC says it needs to be insulated to R-30 but ASHRAE says it needs to be R-38 (typical houses are about R-7 to R-13 in most places in the lower 48 states) when suddenly one of the engineers looks at a schematic plan Intern Kimmy and I drew of there the new RTU was going to go and said--

"Um, did you know there's already an RTU there?"

No. No, we did not know that. Do you have drawings that we don't have?

Oh. You do. You have drawings we don't have. Why is that? How come you have an entire set of drawings of a remodel that took place three years ago and we don't? Are we not cool enough to have a copy of said drawings? The most recent drawings we have of this building involve a remodel from 1999. And we have some crappy-ass CAD plans from Alphabet Design, who did that remodeling job in 1999 and who also evidently did the remodeling job from three years ago. And you have those drawings. And we don't. In ther words of Dr. Evil, throw us a frickin' bone here.

As we all look at the drawings showing the existing RTU, it turns out that this unit was installed about a year ago, and it was undersized from the day it went in. Thing is, Alphabet Design's in-house engineers supposedly sized the unit to provide air for two of the three floors of FCH, including the surgery suite, whenever they were going to remodel it. Which is weird, because if you ran the calculations even back then, even Ronnie Milsap could have seen that the unit was going to be too small to provide air for half the hospital, part of which included two 600-square-foot operating rooms that require megahuge amounts of fresh, HEPA-filtered air. So now, we have to figure out if we should try to fit two small units on this already-crowded roof, or if we should remove the pretty-much-new RTU, sell it on Mechanical Subcontractor eBay, and buy a new unit that is truly sized correctly to provide air to the half of the hospital that it's supposed to serve.

Either way, we're fixing a mistake we inherited, which as I understand it has pretty much been our experience with Alphabet Design. They produce crappy CAD drawings that aren't even remotely accurate (both on TCMC and FCH), they didn't even read ADAAG correctly and gave us crappy plans when we were their architect of record on another hospital (with Avanta, no less), and now they've undersized this RTU for this poor li'l hospital out in the boonies. Really, Alphabet Design? Really?

Forget the wine glass; just leave the bottle.

The agony of renovations (or, one of the reasons for this blog's name)

I remembered recently why I hate renovations. Well, hate might be a strong word. I intermittently loathe renovations, especially renovations on really old buildings. Nothing old enough to be on the National Register of Historic Places, the renovation of which would probably make you walk around with a vodka-and-cranberry-juice IV drip, but just really old stuff. I've blogged before about how it's hard to reuse old hospitals and bring them up to today's space and HVAC/electrical standards as well as building, accessibility, and healthcare codes, and I'm revisiting some of those old pains again on my two surgery renovation projects. Pour a fresh glass of cabernet, kids, and gather 'round.

A few weeks ago, Intern Timmy and I went to the site for TCMC and did some as-builting. We brought a print (to 1/8" scale) of the CAD plan for TCMC and measured just about everything, just to make sure our CAD plan was up to date. Some of the existing walls in the building were going to be used for temporary walls that will separate the surgery suite as we remodel it in phases, and we have one option for remodeling that involves expanding the surgery suite outside the existing building and adding on, so we have to make sure that the exterior doors and walls and whatnot really are where the plan says they are. So, Intern Timmy and I bring along a 25' measuring tape (the one 100' tape our office has was checked out) and measured. every. single. wall. and. door. and. thing. inside. and. out.

Or so we thought. When I went back again for a second visit, I made a few more measurements. With those fnial measurements, Timmy was ready to properly build the model in Revit, which is a 3D software that's replacing CAD as the gold standard for drawing and documenting projects. As he built the model, he brought to my attention that our as-builts showed that the building was 10' shorter than the old drawings from 1965 said. "We match architectural," he said, "but not structural." We mused on this, compared the architectural plans to the structural plans, and then I proclaimed that something was amiss and we would just have to tell Howie about it sometime soon when he'd finished everything else in the model. We were damn sure of those as-built measurements, so we know we didn't make a mistake there.

There was an obvious solution to the problem, but Intern Timmy and I hadn't figured it out yet. It wasn't until a few hours before a meeting with the contractor that we a) told Howie the problem and b) realized the obvious solution. We were meeting with the contractor to show them what we had built in the Revit model and ask them about what they need to make the model useful to them. Contractors can use Revit models to help them figure out scheduling as well as pricing--the model can tell you exactly how many square feet of drywall it has in it, how many feet of wall (divided by 16" and you find out how many studs you need to buy), how many yards of concrete, etc. So, Howie's looking at the plans, looking at our 10" bust in dimensions, gets appalled and offended by how we took our as-built dimensions (Timmy told him that someone had the 100' tape checked out, but it was cold comfort to him), and by the time he suggested the obvious solution, he was beside himself with annoyance that approached anger and was inconsolable.

He said, "Did you check your math when you added up all these dimensions along the outside wall?"

Wow, um...no. No, we didn't. And Intern Timmy and I shared a glance that was something between why didn't we think of that? and do you have a sharp object I can stick in my eye right now?

So he made us take almost an hour to check our math on the dimensions, and then he returned to check our math once again with us (and at this point, Timmy and I were annoyed beyond belief, thinking "Let it go, already.") and lo and behold, we were only 1.25" off from the drawings, which is pretty good for as-builting in the field. We then had to locate a line of columns in the surgery suite (which of course, when located properly, ended up right in every main hall we had in the frickin' suite) and then save the Revit files onto a jump drive to take to the contractor's office.

By the time we got to their office, Howie had calmed down, and the meeting went well. He appears to have gotten over it, but for a while there we thought we were going to have to clean out our desks. And Timmy and I realized that we still need to go confirm some more dimensions, because we're getting yet another dimension bust at one of the walls that we're going to use to separate the two construction phases, and we really need to know where that wall is. And that news reminded me of why renovations make me drink. Heavily.

Pruitt-Igoe and the failure of the modern housing projects

Gather round, my children, and I'll tell you the story of Pruitt-Igoe, a housing project that was meant to be the post-war hope of the future and ended up being a sorry mess.

The Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex was designed by Minoru Yamasaki, a Japanese architect who followed the International Style (what most of us think of as "modern"), for the city of St. Louis. Post-WWII, St. Louis the city had been deserted by anyone with any money for the suburbs. The city decided to demolish a large swath of dilapidated houses and small, run-down apartment complexes and put up instead Le Corbusier's wet dream.

The complex was designed in the early 1950s, and after a round or two of value engineering (where you change the design in order to decrease the cost of a project), construction was completed in 1955. Over 50 acres were cleared for the 33 buildings of the complex. The buildings were originally separated into two groups, the Pruitt complex and the Igoe complex; one would hold blacks and any other minorities, and the other would hold whites. The complexes were integrated in the late 1950s. Upon its completion, the world's architecture journals praised it as a beautiful example of International Style housing, which many architects of the time believed was just the way to alleviate and even end poverty and to cure society's ills. Some residents, upon first moving in, said it looked like a dream come true.

But it wasn't long until the complex looked like this:

Remember that value engineering I mentioned earlier? First of all, Yamasaki's firm proposed a mix of varying heights and densities of buildings--low rise, high rise, and walk-ups (not more than three stories)--but that plan was nixed and all buildings were set at eleven stories each in order to economize each building's construction. Some politicians attributed the high cost estimates to having to pay union wages to the construction crews. Regardless, money had to be saved somehow, and changing the size and shape of the buildings wasn't the only way. In order to get more people into smaller building footprints, the units were way too small and had inadequate kitchens and plumbing fixtures. Even worse were that the elevators only stopped on three of the eleven floors--it costs a lot of money to stop an elevator on a floor, so by stopping it on the first, fourth, seventh, and tenth, you save a lot of cash, right?

What they saved in up-front construction cost, they lost in the long run. Too many people from different neighborhoods in substandard conditions made for a lot of tension amongst the residents. Thugs and thieves waited in the stairwells for people returning from their jobs with paychecks and the mailboxes with their monthly assistance checks as they climbed up to their floors where the elevators didn't stop.

By the late 1960s, only one of the buildings had any residents in it at all. Estimates vary on maximum occupancy, but they range from 33% to 60% full at its fullest. The first of the buildings was imploded in 1972, and the last imploded in 1976. In 21 years, the critically-acclaimed housing complex was no more.

So what happened? I don't think the fact that it was a "modern" building was the problem. My research on designing homeless shelters (that was my thesis, bitches) as well as my experience in healthcare architecture has shown me that if you don't give people nice things, they don't care about what's around them and won't take care of it. Put poor people who know they're poor in cheap-ass-looking public housing and don't even give them adequate space and for the love of Philip Johnson, you don't even have the elevator stop on each floor...well, you've made it pretty clear that you don't think very highly of these folks. And they will behave accordingly and treat their building that way.

It's also a matter of scale. The psychological concept of crowding has shown in animal studies and to a less-controlled extent in people that if you put too many of any mammalian species in a given area, they react poorly and engage in destructive behaviors. Furthermore, it's worth noting that a nearby public housing complex that had fewer units per building had much less vandalism, and its residents were much more careful about taking care of their gronds and keeping them clean. Studies have shown (and of course I can't put my hands on them right now, but I distinctly recall this) that people are more likely to help out when there's fewer of them present. One study on this concept found that if there are ten people in a room, and they hear someone fall in the next room and cry out, the "oh help!" person is not very likely to get help from any of those people, but they're much more likely to get help if there are only one or two people in that other room. So, with Pruitt-Igoe, if you put 20 units on a floor, they tend not to take care of their public areas (halls, courtyards, etc.) as much as they would if there were three or four units on that floor. In my eyes and experience, the failure of Pruitt-Igoe was less of an architectural aesthetic failure and more of a planning, policy, and psychology/sociology failure.

By the way, Pruitt-Igoe was not the only notable piece of architecture that Minoru Yamasaki designed. Know what else he did?

I bet you do know.

Edited 12/9/2011: I appreciate the continued feedback on this post, and I'm aware that evidence regarding the architectural intentions of Pruitt-Igoe's architect and the planners have recently been made clearer in a variety of books and articles in the past several years. More recently, a documentary title The Pruitt-Igoe Myth sought not only to delve into the socioeconomic issues involved in Pruitt-Igoe's creation and demise but also to understand the architectural and planning issues and decisions made regarding the project. As better information and research on this topic is produced by others who have the time and ability to do so, I urge readers to seek out those resources and will close this particular post for receiving comments. Glad to know that this topic still provides lively discussion in the public sphere, and hopefully it will continue to do so in the spirit of improving the public realm's aesthetic as well as how we care for those less fortunate than us.

There is no 13th floor...until now.

Part of the deck (floor or roof surface) of a 14-story building under construction collapsed today in Greenwood Village, CO, which is about 30 minutes south of Denver proper (in an area we call the Tech Center). From the photos, it looks like it was a post-tensioned cast-in-place slab that collapsed. Despite the fact that it was top news here in town today, I had to hear it from Miss Kitty via an IM chat this afternoon. According to one local news channel's website, a portion of the 14th floor collapsed onto the 12th floor. "There is no 13th floor, said officials" the website reported.

Um, yeah. You do have a 13th floor. As comic Mitch Hedberg observed, "If your building goes from 12 to 14, everyone on the 14th floor knows what's up."

Here's a photo showing the section of the building that fell, just one floor.
The website reported that the fall may have had something to do with some formwork being removed and some supports underneath giving way. Here's a closeup of the collapsed section.

The long stringy things that are hanging down are the post-tension rods that are now not in tension because the concrete around them is gone. You put the rods in sleeves, then pour concrete around them, then when the concrete is cured you use a machine (I think it's a machine, some type of tool; my mom used to work on post-tensioned CIP slabs) to stretch the cables. Stops on the ends of the cables hold them in tension, and the slab then gets its strength from the tension of the cables pulling against the concrete. If that makes no sense, don't fret. I'll do an upcoming Detail of the Week on it.

See the vertical wood sticks to your left of the hole? That's shoring--supports holding up the concrete as it completes curing. Funny they said that about the formwork. When I read the news report online this afternoon, Norman came over to my desk to look at the damage. "Wonder if there's an RFI in there about 'can we take the formwork off early?'" he said.

"What, you think that's what it was?" I asked him.

"Maybe," he replied. "Every project I've ever done and ever seen done with cast-in-place slabs has an RFI where the contractor wants to take the formwork off earlier than the structural engineer says to, just 'cause a lot of engineers make them leave it on longer than necessary."

"Hmm." I didn't have much of a reply. Wheatlands was precast concrete, so there was no arguing from the contractor. I'm even more troubled by the website's indication that construction was behind schedule, and rushing to finish is a good way to make mistakes. I don't know that rushing and being behind is why maybe just maybe the formwork was popped off early and the floor fell in and 14 people went to the hospital, but.... It sure doesn't make them look good.

But it doesn't end with the contractor. According to the news report on the website, the owner added another floor and made changes that possibly pushed the schedule behind. Adding a floor to a building that's already been designed and engineered sounds like a nightmare to a Pixie. I thought the staff at Wheatlands finally choosing radiology equipment a month after the CDs went out was a pain in the ass. Reckon I don't know pain like this project knows. 14 people in the hospital kind of pain.