Food--and space--for thought

Check out this link to Tumbleweed Tiny Houses:

http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/houses.htm

Jay Shafer, the mastermind behind Tumbleweed, designs houses that you can buy as plans or as a kit that you assemble on site. Ranging from 150 sf to 600 sf, his little houses make the most efficient use of space. While one might think of these houses as a weekend getaway or a part time cottage, bear in mind that Shafer himself lives in one of his creations that's only 100 sf. (One of his house designs is a 40 sf trailer.)

His work inspires me. When I see these gems of house plans, it makes me think of architect and author of The Not So Big House, Sarah Susanka. In her book, she described the fantastic house plans that she and her designer husband shopped around to get a loan to build it. Designed for the way they truly lived, it really made the best of every square foot and put more cost into good design and details than into gross square footage. Their bank turned them down for a loan. The reason? Their house plans showed no formal dining room. This was explained to Susanka when she spoke to the bank manager. But like a really good architect, she got the manager to talk about his own house, which had him eventually confessing that every party his family had managed to wind up in the kitchen around the breakfast bar while the large, formal dining room was simply a place to hold food and beverages. Same thing for meals with the family: either in front of the TV or in the breakfast nook by the kitchen. Upon realizing his confession, the bank manager approved Susanka's construction loan.

In many housing lot developments in the Rocky Mountains, especially those located near ski resorts, each lot purchase comes with a minimum required square footage of any domicile built on the lot. Translation: even if your family could spend a week in the mountains in 600 sf, you might be required to build at least twice that amount of space. Now, granted there's some method to this madness, as homes of a certain size tend to cost a certain amount and would then keep the whole development's property values up. And granted, if you can afford a nice piece of mountain real estate, you can afford to build a dry-stack stone-and-timber McMansion with high gables and a high-six to low-seven-figure price tag. But at the same time, this rule requires that people use more natural resources than necessary in order to build structures in which they spend less than a quarter of their time.

So, some things to think about this weekend as you stroll around your own domicile:

• Think about how much time you spend in what rooms in your house. How much smaller could your own home be if, say, a kitchenette was moved into your den?
• Do you need more space or just less stuff?
• The average home in Tokyo, Japan in 2003 was 710 sf. 30% of those homes are detached housing (meaning not an apartment). Most of the industrialized world lives in smaller homes that the U.S. does. How would you and your family live in that much space?
• Measure the room in your home in which you spend most of your time. Multiply width by length for the area in square feet. You already spend most of your time in that size space. What would make that room work better? A futon instead of a sofa? Shelves above head height for seasonal decorations or things you don't use more often than once a month?

Detail of the Week: a primer on ADA

I've decided to take the middle road today on the DotW and attempt to explain a bit about the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which mandates that spaces and equipment must be designed so that most people with most disabilities can use public spaces without needing help from a staff member or having a helper with them. The ADA also has a book of how the spaces and equipment should be designed, called the ADA Accessibility Guidelines (ADAAG). Architects also use the American National Standards Institute's space configurations (ANSI A117.1) because they are sometimes stricter than ADAAG. Recent revisions to ADAAG have made ADAAG more stringent, so we're back to using them.

The ADA requires that a public facility make a real attempt to comply. There are requirements for how many toilets, desks, phones, etc. must comply with their regulations. For example, a facility with private sleeping rooms, like a hotel or hospital, is often allowed to make only one in ten rooms comply with ADAAG. (However, if your project receives government funds to be built, then all rooms must comply.)

As a matter of fact, let's take a primary example of ADAAG space requirements for a lavatory and a toilet. Now, I should note that in architecture, we have sinks and lavatories. A sink is a stainless steel or aluminum basin that sits in a countertop. A lavatory is made of china, porcelain, or solid surface material that sits either in a countertop or can be mounted directly to a wall. So, we're dealing today with a basic lavatory and toilet in one room for use by one person alone. Let's look first at the requirements for a toilet:

These requirements are pretty extensive. The plan shows how much space needs to be around the toilet, free from obstructions like walls, columns, pipes, anything. It also shows how the toilet need to be mounted, how high off the floor and how far away from the side wall. The elevation also show to locate the grab bars on the wall. Now let's look at the lavatory:

Here again we see requirements for how big and how small the lavatory can be and how much clear space is needed around and underneath the lavatory. Lavatories with exposed drain pipes below (like the one in the elevation above) require insulation on them to protect knees from being bumped or even scalded if really hot water goes down the pipes.

Now, when you put these two fixtures in a room together, there are additional requirements. A room needs to have a 30 inch by 48 inch space available for a wheelchair to maneuver into so the person can close the door behind them. Also, when the door is closed, the room needs to have a circle that's 60 inches in diameter in the floor that doesn't intersect the lavatory or the toilet so the wheelchair can turn completely around. These other requirements add even more space to a room. The hardest thing about ADAAG is that because maneuvering a wheelchair takes a lot of space, suddenly a hall that could suffice at 4'-0" wide now has to be at least 5'-0" wide. When this happens, suddenly we have a little less space that we thought we had to fit in a toilet room, three offices, and a copy alcove. Suddenly, the offices can only be 100 square feet instead of 110 square feet because the hall needs to be a little wider. This is often tough to explain to the users of a space. They say, "We don't get it; these bathrooms are huge! Here's what our existing bathrooms in our old hospital look like:"

"See? Our present toilet rooms are only 5 feet 1 inch wide and 6 feet 6 inches deep, and they're fine!"

"Yes," we respond, "but your hospital was built before 1980, which is when the ADA was passed. Before then, you didn't have to hire handicapped people--they often couldn't find work because people wouldn't hire 'cripples'. But after the ADA was passed, you couldn't refuse to hire the person because of their incapacity, and you actually have to make provisions for them to work at your business. One of those provisions is making the can big enough to get a wheelchair in and around, so your new toilets have to look like this, at minimum:"

And then they say, "Oh." And we say, "Yeah, oh. And trust us, you're gonna like having a bathroom you can actually turn around and change clothes in."

ADA is a big deal these days in our litigious culture. There are ADA watchdog groups that go around to new buildings and measure clearances and will then file complaints against the facility if the clearances are even 1/4 of an inch too small. A toilet room can be off by 1/4 of an inch by a) construction tolerances (things get lost in the building of the walls) or b) because the design of the walls didn't account for the tile on them. The dimensions between the walls is to the face of the drywall, but tile adds another 1/4" to 1/2" to the face of the drywall. So, there you go--little things add up. I know of an architect whose contractor had to move all the patient room toilets over one inch after a code official came in and found that the toilets were 1'-5" off the wall instead of 1'-6". Crazy, y'all.

Know what's really freaky? After doing healthcare for six and a half years, I can draw these sketches from memory.

All images from the 2006 ADAAG website:
http://www.access-board.gov/adaag/html/adaag.htm

Back from the wilds of Wheatlands

My landscape architect, Dash, and I went out to Wheatlands today, so at least I had some good company to ride three and a half hours each way. Dash originally went to architecture school and did what I do now for a while before going back to school to become a landscape architect. This is a good thing for me because Dash better understands what I'm trying to do indoors and with the exterior of the building, so he can make the landscape become almost an exterior "room" for the building. He has impeccable taste in clothes, furniture, plants, and catty comments. He's a hoot, to say the least.

My building is gorgeous, but y'all already knew that. Punchlist time is coming up for all of April, which will make me a busy little pixie for the next two months. Punchlist is the process of (usually) the architect walking through the building and making notes on the condition of the building: dings in the walls, incomplete wall base, paint scratched off of a door frame, plastic laminate not fully adhered to the countertop, insufficient water pressure in toilets or sinks, cabinet doors not closing completely or hanging unevenly when closed, etc. We walk room by room and check everything, putting a colored sitcker or piece of blue painting/masking tape by things that need to be corrected. From the looks of the building today, my punchlists in April and early May should be pretty short. That building is in fantastic shape.

I'm vascillating between two different Details of the Week tomorrow. One has political implications but would also be more interesting. I'll have to think it over and decide Friday evening which to do....

Speaking of pharmaceuticals, I could use some myself...

...because I've been piddling around with my pharmacy at Wheatlands all day.

There is a primary set of regulations that dictate how pharmacies should be run and how chemicals in them should be processed called USP 797. There are three levels of pharmacies, classified depending on the hazardousness or the specialness of the chemicals that get mixed in them: low-risk CSP, medium-risk CSP, and high-risk CSP. For this entire project, we've been designing Wheatlands' pharmacy as a low-risk CSP pharmacy. They mix pretty tame stuff and only use it in-house (it's not a pharmacy like the ones at which you fill your prescriptions, like a CVS or Walgreens). The head of nursing showed the floor plan of the pharmacy to a pharmacist in a nearby larger town and had him review it with his understanding of USP 797. He said it looked good to him.

Well, some guy who's supplying the fume hood for the chemotherapy chemical mixing room mentioned USP 797 again and told the head of nursing about a few things she better make sure she had in the pharmacy, such as seamless flooring and HEPA filters. The design team leaps into the air and shouts, "What?! We thought we did that already!" So, I call this guy and he sends me to a website where I get the 100+ page PDF of USP 797 (which I've been trying to find for this whole project). I ask him about flooring and light fixtures, and he says:

"Oh, I don't really do much with the building. I'm more concerned with the processes in the pharmacy, like where and how they handle the chemicals."

Well, thanks, Scooter Bob. Why the fuck did you mention finishes if you don't actually look at them? Anyway, the design reviews the standards, clarified a few of our finishes, confirmed that we had all the right filters and fixtures, and went on our way. As I was wrapping up this issue, I emailed the hospital and informed them that all was well, we comply with the USP 797 regulations for a low-risk CSP pharmacy.

We do have a low-risk pharmacy, right?

The head of nursing confirmed this for us.

Then I got an email on Friday. The head of nursing had been idly talking to her pharmacist in the other town over and mentioned that she was mixing a "banana bag" (an IV bag that includes vitamins and electrolytes, often given to severely dehydrated patients or alcoholics in the ED), and the pharmacist suddenly says, "Oh, banana bags? Those make you have a medium-risk CSP pharmacy."

Fuck.

The design team goes into another tailspin. Everyone tears open their copies of the USP 797 again to discover that we now need an extra sink in the ante area/buffer room, which means we have to sawcut the slab (with the seamless flooring already installed) to install another waste line. Worse, my mechanical engineer found fishy language in USP 797 saying that the buffer room "should" provide 40 feet per minute airflow in that room. This room is only 140 square feet total--40 fpm is going to turn that room into a wind tunnel. "Pixie, they'll get so annoyed with their papers and gowns blowing around in that room that they'll just shut off the equipment and never use it!" my engineer nearly wept into the phone.

I call the head of nursing and get a name and phone number for the state pharmacy board. I call and talk to a guy who's trying to be helpful, but God help him he works for the government and can only say so much because he only knows so much. "So what about this 40 fpm airflow in this buffer room?" I asked him. "We're already supplying more air than required for a low-risk CSP, but that's gonna turn that room into a wind tunnel. Do we have to do it? The code says 'should', not 'shall', which would be more definitive." And he says:

"We really don't so much with the building, ma'am. We're more concerned with the processes in the pharmacy, like wher and how they handle the chemicals."

Wow. Deja poo: I feel like I've heard this shit before.

So, he says for the purposes of the Kansas state pharmacy board, he says that as long as the airflow in the room is the same as what this one clinical requirement says on this one page of the USP 797, they're fine. So, I call my engineer back, who stil feels weird about the whole thing, so I give him the pharmacy board guy's name and number.

Later this evening at home, Guy asks me how was my day. Now, comedian Chris Rock says that the question "How was your day?" is a 45-minute conversation for a woman. This is also true for me. I'm venting about the pharmacy and how we've gotta design to this ridiculous and unclear code and how this pharmacy guy said that they hadn't even adopted USP 797 yet but would be later this year--

"Bullshit!" crowed Guy. "When I did the addition to Sunflower Medical Center out there three years ago, the state board said they were gonna pass USP 797 'later that year.' They still haven't! It's fucking impossible for state agencies to adopt new codes and regs because the state legislature has to pass the law for them and they're too busy arguing over funding education and banning gay marriage!"

I put down the spoon I was using to stir my pasta alfredo and called my engineer from home. "Jerry, have you called the pharmacy board guy yet?"
He sighed. "No, it's on my list."
"When you call, dude, don't push him too hard on the 40 fpm thing. They've been saying they were gonna pass USP 797 for over three years now, so we don't wanna back this guy into a corner and make him tell us to follow the letter of the code."
"Which will just back us into a corner."
"Right."
"No sweat, Pixie. I'll poke him with a very dull stick tomorrow."
"Thank you sir."
"I hear something sizzling."
"Shit! My pasta!"
I"m hanging up now, Pix."

My love/hate relationship with Frank Gehry

Okay, here's the deal. What can you say about a man whose own house looks like this:

Mies van der Rohe, champion of the International Style of architecture, once said, “Less is more.” His predecessor, Phillip Johnson, said, “Less is a bore.” Frank Gehry, post-modern architect and starchitect of the 21st century, said, “Fuck it. Give me another shot of Jager and pass me the mouse.”*

Gehry (born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1929 and now a naturalized American citizen) likes to do some wild shit. He uses software originally designed for the aerospace industry to design his buildings, which are hard to describe and I bet even harder to draw and still harder to build.


This is the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. This disasterpiece really put him on the map as arguably the most forward-thinking designer of our recent history. It got to the point where one in ten visitors to Bilbao was there to see the building—not the art in it, but the building itself. Pollution and traffic has also greatly worsened in Bilbao due to the faithful flocking to see this building, his initial tribute to taking software to the next level.

Here are a few photos of his $400 million lab building he designed (and Bill and Melinda Gates paid for) on the campus of MIT. I snapped several photos of it when Guy and I visited Boston in the fall of 2006.

Usually, an architect describes a building by showing its four main elevations (or exterior sides): north, south, east, and west. Sometimes, they have to also draw elevations that are tucked in or at an angle to these four cardinal directions. Now, the thing about a Gehry building is that you cannot easily describe it with four, or even eight exterior elevations. You have to draw about twenty elevations, and you can only view them by taking a hit of acid and listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon while using the drawing set as a flip book.

What disturbs me about Gehry is what disturbs me about most starchitects these days: I really think he’s weird for weird’s sake. The swooping, bizarre, curvilinear forms that really took everyone’s breath away in Bilbao are now a motif, a logo, a signature. But not a signature on a finely handcrafted piece of art, but a signature on a receipt from the grocery store. It’s the same set of swoops and loops and points and squiggles that you can look at and go, “Oh, yeah, that’s Frank’s. Throw it in the trash can; looks like he already crumpled it up for you.” He uses the software because he can, cuz it’s there, and sometimes that’s just not a good enough reason anymore.

I find his buildings ignorant of place and climate. In an earlier comment post, frequent commenter Faded noted that the titanium panels on one of his buildings had to be sanded because they were shining sunlight into an office building, thereby blinding its occupants and rendering part of their building unusable. I find his buildings derivative of his Bilbao disasterpiece, like he just copies and pastes chunks of those drawings into all his other drawings.

But…

I also have to give Gehry credit for taking a leap of faith and courage and using really advanced software. Our office is still bitching back and forth about going from AutoCAD/ADT to Revit, and for the love of Sheena Easton, we still have some people in our office using lines instead of wall objects. So I have to at least respect him for being willing to experiment and learn how to use new software. And along those same lines, Gehry uses his software fully to help the contractor build his building, which I know contractors appreciate.

I also have to hand it to Gehry: he knows his reputation and isn’t afraid to make fun of himself. In an episode of The Simpsons, Marge sends him a letter asking him to design the new Springfield Concert Hall. He dismisses the idea, crumples the letter, and throws it on the ground. He then looks down at the crumpled form and gasps, “Frank Gehry, you’re a genius!” and builds the Springfield Concert Hall to look exactly like Marge’s crumpled letter. Several other jokes about his architecture and persona were made in the episode, and he even did his own voice for the show. More recently, he designed the trophy for the World Cup of Hockey, which was revealed to pretty startled and lukewarm reviews to the press. During the awkward silence that followed the unveiling, Gehry said, “I can tell you don’t like it,” and chuckled. (He offered to redesign it, but the World Cup of Hockey powers-that-be passed, if I recall.)

Furthermore, he’s conscious of pop culture and has made attempts to make it a little better. He designed a digital watch that reads time in the way that you say it aloud. So when the time is 1:50, the watch face reads “10 til 2”. He also designed jewelry for Tiffany, which makes me happy cuz the Tiffany website and the Godiva website are like porn to me. Now, if he’d design a dark chocolate Walt Disney Performance Hall, I’d forgive him all his trespasses.

So, I hate Gehry because he’s overly-artsy and contrived of late, but I also like his humility. Overall, I can’t really complain too much. When I was growing up, I’d tell people that I wanted to be an architect, and they’d all say the same thing: “Oh, you’re gonna be a little Frank Lloyd Wright!” God, I hope not, I’d think. Wright was a philandering snob who thought he was God and died broke. But when architects become part of everyday culture, as Gehry has done, he increases the public’s ability to understand and even critique architecture. And that, after all, is not a bad thing.

*I don't actually know that Gehry drinks heavy when he designs. I'm just saying....

Detail of the Week: Mechanical Magnetism

One of the benefits of designing hospitals is that by learning what goes into a hospital, it demystifies the equipment and processes. Especially the radiology, or imaging, department--understanding how the equipment works makes them less scary. Historically, the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) is the freakiest. That's the machine Linda Blair is stuck in in The Exorcist; it's the machine that goes BAM-BAM-BAM-BAM! while she has a needle in her neck and they're trying to figure out if there's something wrong with her brain.

Well, MRIs (or MRs, as Wheatlands' head of radiology calls them) have come a long way since 1972. They boom faster but quieter now, and as they pass repeatedly over you, they make different sounds. What MRs do is align all the cells in your body in the same direction and use that alignment to take pictures of you in slices. The magnet is always on, so there's a perimeter into which no ferrous (iron-containing) objects can be taken. Here's a plan of an MR:

An MR's magnet strength is measured in teslas (as in Nikolai Tesla, who discovered radio frequencies and essentially created radios). Two kinds of MRs are made: 1.5T MRs and 3.0T MRs. This is a 1.5 T MR; usually, 3.0T MRs are used in teaching facilities. (They're not that useful because the software hasn't caught up to them yet.) You can kinda see light outlines with labels of 70 Gauss out to 1 Gauss around the MR. The power of a magnetic field is measured in gauss (pronounced gowss), and these lines show how strong the magentic field is. The RF (radiofrequency) shielding in the walls protects objects outside from the super-badass magnet inside this room (as opposed to the lead shielding in a CT scan or X-ray room, which protects people outside from the radiation inside). See, people have actually died from ferrous items flying in an MR room. Several years ago, a child was undergoing an MRI when a nurse not familiar with MRI procedures brought a portable oxygen tank into the room. The tank flew across the room, hit the child in the head, and killed the child. Lawsuits ensued and better design ideas and clinical procedures followed.

This is a special door with RF shielding in it. It's four feet wide so you can roll a stretcher in it (an aluminum stretcher, of course) and it's really heavy because of all the shielding in it. It also opens out of the room instead of into the MR room. This is in case of a quench. See, the magnet that runs all the time needs to stay cool, so there are two gases in the compartment with the magnet that stay compressed to keep it cool. (When the gases uncompress, which happens regularly, a pump recompresses them. If you ever hear an MR machine "chirping", it's that pump.) Very very rarely, something terrible happens and those gases uncompress all at once. If they do, a pipe running from the magnet compartment to outside the building funnels the now-solidified ice crystals (at nearly absolute zero, which is -273 degrees F, if I recall correctly) of the gases at a couple hundred miles an hour outside to a safe, clear area. However, this explosion of gases (called a quench) also makes the air pressure in the MR room really high. If the door opens into the room, you can't get in to get the patient, and they're trapped in the room with a million-dollar piece of equipment that's kinda having a meltdown. But if the door opens out like this one, you can get in and get the person out.

This is looking at the RF shielding in the wall before they finished the door jamb. The wide, silver things on each side are metal studs holding up the wall, and the reddish-copper curvy thing in the middle is, well, copper shielding. To the right of the copper is a layer of another shielding material, the composition of which escapes me right now.

Panels with copper and other shielding materials are laid on the floor and ceiling, again to protect the magent from iron in the soil, rebar in the concrete floor slab, etc.

Here's the inside of the MR room, shielding in place. The lines you see over the silverish inside of the shielding are aluminum studs, to which the contractor will affix drywall. Sheet vinyl flooring will be installed over the floor shielding. An acoustical lay-in ceiling will be hung to cover the shielding above.

Okay, one more photo and I'll leave you alone for the weekend. The above is pretty blurry, since there were no indoor ceiling lights in the building at the time. This is the window from the control room into the MR room. The reflection is partially caused by a screen in the window, which looks like a really dense window screen. Truth be known, the glass in the window is only to protect the screen. It provides no magnetic protection whatsoever. Cool, huh?

Edited: Faithful commenter and engineer BaxterWatch reminded me that absolute zero is actually -273 Kelvin, which is about -460 degrees F. The temperature of the cryogen from an MR quench is about -240 degrees F. Still pretty cold, but not as cold as absolute zero. What makes me a bigger dork, that I know what abosulte zero is, or that I'd correct myself about its actual value?

Scale Figures Gone Wild: Too Hot for CDs

Architects often draw scale figures in our elevations (two-dimensional flat pictures of a wall with cabinets and/or equipment) so that the size of the room can be understood by the contractor as well as the owner. Recently, one of Elliot's ne'er-do-well pals from architecture school sent him some scale figures that were, shall we say, inappropriate for one's drawings.

Naturally, we Fearsome Foursome (Derek, Elliot, Jimmy Ray, and me) began populating our elevations with these figures and making PDFs of them. A few for your perusal:

Exhibit A: It's so sad when a simple check-in procedure at the radiology reception desk breaks out into fisticuffs.

Exhibit B: To paraphrase Chris Tucker and Ice Cube, "It's Friday, we're sittin' around in front of the hospital, ain't got shit to do..."

Exhibit C: Oops, looks like someone only made it as far as the emergency department's ambulance garage before they had a definite emergency...

Well, what can I say? It was one of those days again at Design Associates.