...and now it's time for a break.

Due to a flash sale from Airtran last week, my sister was able to fly out on Saturday to visit me for a few days.  She hasn't been out for a visit to the Mile High Cit-tay since January of 2010, right before my kitteh Maddy crossed the Rainbow Bridge, which means she's just now meeting Gracie, aka The Floof. And Hazel hasn't been snuggled with extreme prejudice the way Aunt Kitty snuggles for two years.  Kittehs suspect nuffin.


It's been one thing after another at the office, with two big projects in very needy stages. Gestalt's Uber MOB is in CA, so every question is urgent; St. Ermahgerd is just starting schematic design, so we're making fast and crucial decisions regarding how the building should look and how the departments should be arranged and laid out.  I've been moving so fast and furious lately that I've actually been getting in Howie's grill, being defensive and reflexively irate.  Kitty's appearance in the Mile High gives me an opportunity to take a Monday off and bring my blood pressure down a little bit. 


Breathe, snuggle kittehs, flip through Elle Decor, and rest.

Next on The Life of Pixie: Drama, rumors, and a little better pat on the back, Part 1

So Happy New Year and Feliz Nuevos Anos and all. I know I haven't been good at keeping y'all up with the goings-on at Design Associates recently, but the fact is I've been busy as hell just doing my job and trying to fight through some holiday/end-of-year irritation. Let's see if I can sum things up with any grace or coherence as we move into 2012.

I wrapped up the construction documents and a couple of addenda on Gestalt's Uber MOB right around Thanksgiving, and Jesus Mary and Renzo Piano was I looking forward to a slower December. But alas, 'twas not to be. So I had to go out of town for a three-day series of meetings that involved being away from Guy and home and kittehs and being with people who were for some reason rubbing me the wrong way. We added a new healthcare planner (and licensed architect) to our ranks earlier this year, and while I'm trying not to feel threatened, I feel, well, threatened. I felt like at times during those meetings that I was having to prove my skills and abilities and even the right to be at these meetings once again to a new person, and it pissed me off. I think Bosley's goal of putting this other planner and me on the same team is to get a sense of consistency in our healthcare planning processes, but it just felt sometimes like there was no point in including me on this. It felt like there were too many cooks in the kitchen.

And dammit, that pisses me off, that feeling of being extra and feeling like I have to prove myself yet again. Not only have I been at DA for more than a decade, but I think I've proven myself time and time again. I've gone above and beyond the call of duty and overdelivered. I'm done proving myself...and at the end of 2011, I found myself increasingly ready to ask for, if not demand, a promotion and a raise. Not just an "oh, well, things have been tough this year" raise, but a raise commensurate with the kind of work I'd been doing for the past year-plus. Howie and Sven and I had discussed a possible promotion for me a few months ago, and I had reached the point where it was put-up-or-shut-up time for DA's leadership.

Speaking of leadership, DA's partners hired a management consultant firm to talk to select members of DA and ask about DA's culture and management styles. They wanted to know what was working and what could be improved. And guess who was one of the people who got interviewed?

Oh yes. C'est moi.

So I shared with the consultants what worked (there was room for a variety of styles and goals of people to perform at their best, there's a lot of flexibility in the office culture that allows people to be themselves, the firm does good work and gives everyone a chance to contribute), and I shared what didn't work (roles and steps needed to achieve promotions are incredibly unclear and ill-defined, management is so nonconfrontational of problems and crappy people in the firm that they're just about avoidant of what are obvious issues). So they thanked me for my feedback and sent me on my way. Now, what you'll notice is that I didn't name names, but...some other people did.

Specifically, so many people mentioned Gregg, Guy's old boss, as a problem in the office that the management firm came to the partners and said, "Look, we gotta interview this guy. Too many people have called him out as a problem that we can't avoid it." So, they finally got a hold of Gregg (just as he doesn't respond to his team's entreaties for an answer or some input, he didn't respond at first or even at second to the consultant's requests for a meeting) and had a li'l chat. However, I have no info on the results of that chat, and I'm frankly a little despondent that anything might come of all these meetings. But part of my brain tickles on this whole process--if I were a betting gal, I'd bet that the partners do want to get rid of a few people, but they're so nonconfrontational/avoidant that they won't just say, "You suck, GTFO of here." Instead, they'll hire some management consultants and get them to collect the data that allows the partners to get rid of the person. By doing so, they can kinda shift the blame onto "them"--"other people" in the office, and the consultant. Regardless of the outcome, it will be interesting to see, what, if anything comes of this.

Next: time to pay the Pixie.

Scenes from a project, Part 1

Pixie, Contractor Sid, and some surgery staff members are in a conference room, discussing the layout of a pre-op and post-op suite.

Nurse 1: How big is that patient toilet?

Pixie: It's 7'-2" by 7'-6", a little over 50 square feet.

Nurse 2: Wow, it looks...big.

Nurse 1: [to Nurse 2] Our toilets at Bierstadt Building aren't ADA, that's why this looks so big.

Pixie: Correct. An ADA-compliant toilet is so big I can breakdance in it.

Nurse 2: Oh, okay, well that's fine. I wanna go back to the pre-op bays, though--

Contractor Sid: [looks up suddenly from his laptop] Wait, I wanna go back to the toilets. How did we all just miss Pixie breakdancing?

Pixie, Sven, Contractor Sid, and two Gestalt project managers are talking after the radiology user group meeting.

Pixie: So, the radiologists want to redesign the entire department to have the front desk towards the west instead of the east.

Sven: Aren't we a month out from the end of SDs?

Gestalt Mgr 1: This is a lot to change so close to the deadline--

Gestalt Mgr 2: But if these changes need to happen and the department won't work without it, then... [throws hands in air]

Pixie: Well, look: how about I take just an hour or so to see if what they want works?

Sven: Can you do that in an hour?
Pixie: Well, maybe two. Depends on what you [gestures at Gestalt Mgrs 1 and 2] want. Do you want me to see if it can really work, or do we just want to be able to say 'yeah we tried but it's not gonna work' to the radiologists?

Gestalt Mgr 1: Well, I suppose, um...

Pixie: I can make this plan work or not work. What I'm asking is, do you want me to use my powers for good or for evil?

The deadline: close, but no cigar.

(A quote on a whiteboard in the Canyon Visitor Center at Yellowstone National Park. I'll wait while the grammar/spelling sticklers among us finish twitching.)

We wrapped up our 100% construction documents (CD) deadline for the Gestalt Uber MOB on Monday. I took today off to get a delayed break from the weekend I worked through, and many of my colleagues on the project did the same today and/or yesterday. But we're not done.

Generally, the architect has to produce an addendum (and sometimes multiple addenda) a few weeks after the CDs go out as a response to questions coming in from bidders on the project. However, the addendum/addenda are sometimes used to capture additional items that need to be coordinated but that couldn't be coordinated before the deadline. Also, the addendum can be used to revise the drawings to include last-minute owner-driven changes, of which there will be many in the Uber MOB.

The question we get sometimes, even from engineers and up-and-coming architects, is this: if we're gonna do an addendum anyway and it's a given, why don't we just move the CD deadline to when the addendum would be due? There are two reasons, one practical and one philosophical. The practical reason involves permitting: the CDs are complete enough to take to the city and/or county and start the process of getting a building permit. Since a building permit can take a fair amount of time (generally about a month for most large municipalities), the contractor wants to get that process moving with the CDs while the architect uses a little extra time to work out details or tweak scope in the drawings. The only reason to delay the CDs to match up with the addendum would be if the addendum would include info or drastic changes that could potentially affect the permitting process. The other (philosophical) reason for not moving the CD deadline to the addendum deadline is that this sort of delaying process could go on indefinitely. CDs are never really done--every architect can look at a set of CDs he or she has worked on and see four or five things they wanted to detail/fix/tweak/do better/differently. If we moved every CD deadline to match the addendum, it would get easy to delay it for just a few days or week more, then a few more, then the owner woud hear that we have extra time and say hey if we have some time, let's redesign the so-and-so to look like this and then we'd be forever tweaking the drawings.

So, I have an addendum due in about three weeks. But first, I need a manicure and a nap.

Next on Dr. Phil: architects that rarely draw...but can they sketch??

I've been noticeably mute on my Uber MOB project lately, and indeed on anything architecty. Partially it's because I'm trying to find a way to talk about my work while keeping it anonymous but also helping my tens of readers understand whatever it is I'm complaining about. Talking about architecture to the non-architects (aka, normal people with lives and hobbies) is, I've noticed, a lot like teaching someone how to build a building--you have to have a real project in order to learn. So it's hard for me to talk abstractly about "a project that has lead shielding" or "building that is built on a hill". I really need to say "this project I did in Wheatlands, Kansas" or "the Henderson Replacement Facility." The other reason I'm quiet about it right now is that I'm getting worn out on it.

My Uber MOB project is now in CD phase. CD stands for "construction documents", which are the drawings and specifications that we make to give to the contractor so he/she can actually build the building. The Uber MOB is about a quarter of a million square feet, so we need about three months for each phase:

• SD - schematic design, where we figure out basically where which rooms go where in the departments, what spaces are needed, what spaces we forgot to account for (figuring out where the departments go in the building is also done during SDs, but on a project this size it was part of a separate pre-SD phase)
• DD - design development, where we confirm room locations and then being working out how the building looks, inside and out. We also confirm with the building's users where the cabinets and sinks are, what equipment goes where, and so on.
• CD - construction documents, where we start drawing all the little details in earnest and really work through how all the building's systems work together. (Some of this coordination happens during DDs as well, but now it's Gotta Be Done.)

We're about halfway through CDs right now, and I'm finding that as you move up the food chain in architecture, the less drawing you do. Over the past few months, I find that I spend a lot of time writing meeting notes and doing paperwork for Gestalt (deliver me), researching products, reading code books and writing code studies, reviewing and marking up drawings and specifications, coordinating systems with engineers, and generally just answering questions. My job becomes less about "do the work" and more about "make sure other people have what they need to do the work." It's also my job to poke further on any question or request: you say you need me to lower my ceiling to 8 feet because of your pipes? What's keeping your pipes so low? Where do they run to? Oh, they're for that room/area? Perhaps they can run over here instead and I don't have to lower that ceiling and make this waiting room feel like a shoebox? Excellent--thanks.

But what I notice is that I rarely draw in Revit these days. I spend so much time writing and reading and marking up and making phone calls and talking that I find that I'm getting less familiar with the computer drafting/modeling nuts and bolts of the project, and I'm getting rusty on my skills. This frightens me for a couple of reasons. One, it means that if we even need as many hands as possible to draw a lot for a deadline, it's not entirely safe to have me in the model. (As I've described before, Revit is different from AutoCAD in that one person can delete something and it goes away everywhere in the project, not just in that drawing. This means you can fuck up a lot more in a short amount of time.) I'm also slower in the model once I get in. But the second reason it creeps me out is that being able to use drafting software is something that a lot of architecture firms demand when looking for a position. It's not that I'm looking to change firms, but rather it's that I'm recognizing that I'm losing a skill that everyone seems to find important.

Yet throughout the project, I've been sketching. I go in and print something out of Revit and start tracing over it or marking it up or doodling, thinking about how to make it better. Perhaps an intern brings me a plan or elevation that he can't figure out how to make work, and I doodle and sketch and work it out. That's the part I'm good at--having had to stomp countless floor plans that don't work into plans that flow effortlessly, the sketch or doodle or scaled linework over a printout is the kind of drawing that someone at my level does best. So maybe I do draw. It's not in the way I'm used to drawing in an office, but strangely, it's similar to the way I was used to drawing in school. It's the circle of life, Simba.

Relentless

...is what the pace of work feels like lately. I was hoping that just having Gestalt's Uber MOB as my one project to work on (instead of five like I had last fall) would make things a little easier. However, I'm at the point where it feels like there's no slowdown in speed and effort and there's no end in sight. I'm just worn down from the speed and quantity of stuff to do. Architects reading this blog may say, "well, yeah, Pixie, that's what we do." But really? Did we all slog through six years of school and ten-plus years of work and a nine-part ARE just to have our daily work lives get reduced to lists of tasks on Post-It Notes and a constant stream of phone calls that almost all begin with the words "Hey, what were we going to do at...?"

This is just a sample of my days leading up to the DD set going out: Sit down at my desk at about 8:10am and look at my list of tasks and phone calls and the stack of progress drawings that I need to review and mark up before Friday; do triage. Ask the intern in charge of the doors: did the door hardware consultant send us his spec and hardware schedule yet? does he know our deadline is Friday? make sure he knows. Email Gretchen, the project manager for Gestalt (I can't call her because her voicemail is full) and ask if we have information on the mobile storage system going in the central sterile department, and if not can I just have the storage consultant's email or phone number and I'll call him myself. open the set of progress drawings and look at the ceiling plans, because Intern Jake is going to need at least two days to get through them. We should have these equipment booms located on these drawings (and dear God, I just remembered as I was typing this that I didn't tell the structural engineer about the ceiling-mounted injectors in the MRI and CT and PET CT rooms), so make that note again. Oh crap, the toilet partitions in the main public toilets should be ceiling mounted--mark that, then start composing email to structural engineer about all the things he needs to know about (equipment booms, toilet partitions, the recessed floor at the MRI room for the RF shielding). Phone call from Intern Max--are we showing the lead thicknesses in the walls of the imaging rooms. or is that for CDs? It's for CDs, but that reminds me that I'm not sure that I've sent the lead shielding reports to the contractor or the structural engineer (crap, and as I typed that I remembered that I need lead shielding in the ceiling of two scan rooms, about which the structural engineer knows nothing). Now to email the appropriate parties about the shielding report. A phone call from the plumbing engineer--the plan doens't show the right thickness of walls at all toilets; these are floor-mounted back-fed toilets, and they need 13" out-to-out to get the pipe out and down through the slab. Can you send me a list of where you're seeing these discrepancies? Push ceiling plans aside and start looking at floor plans--I can see where this needs to be done, but I--wait, ceiling plans first, Intern Jake is going to need those. I have to pee. I look at the clock on the computer monitor: it's 9am. Only 50 minutes have passed, and I've accomplished shit all. And I didn't even hit send on the email with the shielding report.

This is why I'm spending the weekend on the balcony with kittehs and plants.

And now, time to hold our breath

Last week, the Uber MOB team wrapped up its schematic design submission to Gestalt HMO's main facility planning committee. When you do a project for a healthcare facility that's part of a bigger health system, it's not just about doing the drawings and having a contractor price them (although that's included)--the health system has to review the project too. Healthcare systems/entities have their own sets of standards that projects have to meet that include (but are not limited to):

• are the construction materials the kinds that they, system-wide, know how to clean and maintain?
• are the materials used in the building the best-priced ones that can also do the job?
• are the rooms and spaces in the project too large or too small to deliver good care?
• does the project account for expansion in the near and not-so-near future? Does it also account for any upgrades or small renovations (e.g., adding extra offices, building out more exam rooms or ORs)?
• does the project make the best use of the site, views, etc.?
• does the project have everything it was programmed to have (e.g., ten pre-op bays for five ORs; one doctor's office for every two exam rooms) that will allow them to deliver cost-effective care?
• and finally, is it under budget, and can it be built on schedule?

These extra reviews can be a pain in the butt, but they add an extra layer of checks and balances to a project. If I can't defend why I, the healthcare architect, can't make a certain group of rooms or a department work the way the health system says it "should", then I'm the one who's wrong. However, if I can make a case for doing something unusual or making a room larger or smaller than the powers-that-be say it "should" be, then I may be able to get them to accept it.

This is also the part where I end up defending the users' requests to the owners. The owners are the healthcare system: in this instance, Gestalt HMO. The users are the doctors and nurses that will be treating patients in the spaces. There's a balancing act between these two groups, as they're not always on the same page.

For example, the owners may say that a GI/endoscope procedure department should only have a 75 square foot break room/kitchenette in their department. The reasoning is that the department's staff shouldn't have a full-on "break room" where they can hide from patients; they should use the building's main break room. The users, however, will argue that they do need a proper break room that's closer to twice the programmed size. The case the users make is that in order to make scope procedures make money (and therefore be worth having in a building), they have to run a case every half hour for nine hours a day in six procedure rooms, which is a lot of staff. Plus, running a case every half hour doesn't leave a lot of time for lunch or a real break. If a gastroenterologist and her two procedure nurses only get a half-hour break for lunch between cases, that's not much time to heat up a lunch and eat it without getting heartburn. And at least the physician can go to her office to eat, but if the GI suite is on the fourth floor and the main building break room is on the first floor, the two GI nurses lose nearly ten minutes going downstairs and getting back upstairs, leaving only 20 minutes to scarf something down and try to recover from the awful case they just had where they had to tell a 40-year-old father of two that he has tumors in his colon.

So all the staff for this busy department needs somewhere close by but off-stage to eat and take a moment to recover from the pace and the mental strain required to do a good job every time all the time. So they really really really want a 130-sf break room. And if I can get one to fit in their department, I'm going to do it. And then the owners will tell us that the users aren't our clients, the owners are. And then I remind the owners that if a user works in a building and a department that prevents them from actually delivering good care, they'll leave a facility and go elsewhere and tell everyone they know that XYZ Health is a joke and run by morons, and that Mile High Pixie chick isn't a very good architect either. Good facilities not only deliver good care, but they also help with staff recruitment and retention, which is a big deal in healthcare.

So, we've sent off our drawings and all our documentation to Gestalt for their review, and we're holding our breath and waiting to exhale like Whitney Houston. And I still have work to do on some other small projects for Gestalt, but that's another post.

Someone call Glenn Frey, because the heat is on.

It was 73 yesterday this weekend in Denver, but I wouldn't have known it since I was in the office. Spring makes for an uncomfortable time in large buildings here in Denver. Our spring weather has multiple personalities--it's 60, then it's 40 and raining, then it's 70, then it's 35 and snowing, and my ass has been through so many freeze-thaw cycles that I think it's just going to give up and fall off. Well, at least then maybe I can find some jeans that fit. Anyway, many large commercial and residential buildings are designed such that going from heating to cooling is a major undertaking--it isn't something you just flip over every other day as you feel like it. Once you flip the system to heat, the HVAC system is going to pump out warm air until sometime in late April or early May, at which point we will switch the system over to cooling, and then the system will pump out cool air from May to October. So if you get a hot day in March or a cold day in August, you're just gonna have to deal. Hence, we've had to turn the heat off and open the doors in the Happy Kitten Highrise condo here lately, and the kittehs are enjoying the sunbeams and fresh air and the change in weather.

The warm-up is making for an interesting office environment, too, and not just because we haven't switched over the HVAC system. Part of the reason that we've been so cold the last couple of winters is that there haven't been as many bodies and computers in the building, what with the layoffs and recession. But lately, we've been a-hiring and now the office is filling up again with bodies and computers and activity. I actually broke a sweat the other day just walking around the office. It seems that work is picking up, and we're getting some projects in finally (mostly healthcare, to be fair, but work is work, and of course I prefer healthcare over anything else).

But back to me being in the office on a lovely, sunny, 73-degree Saturday in Da Mile Hizzle: wtf? Well, one of the largest (and busiest and most profitable) departments in Gestalt HMO's Uber MOB came to us furious back in January. They didn't like where they were in the building, and they didn't like their layout at all, and we better fix this right away. So, having to revamp the entire floor on which they were situated put the project behind schedule, especially the interior part. In order for us to make up time, we're having to separate out the core and shell from the tenant infill. This means that the exterior, structure, floors, and roofs as well as the stairs and elevators and main toilet rooms on each floor and utility rooms will be released to the contractor before the tenant infill (i.e., all the departments of the clinic) will be released, and that core and shell will start construction first. (Note: this happens a lot when building a big building. I've done it in buildings as small as 60,000 sf.) But it also means that we're having to work fast and furious to squeeze as much air out of the schedule as we can and to make up the month-long delay as best we can between now and the end of the design schedule this fall. And that means working some nights and weekends. Hence, Shorty's in the office on a Saturday.

And Gestalt Colorado is getting pressure from the home Gestalt office in the midwest: deliver this building on time, at or under budget, on schedule, and not over-sized. Gestalt National told the local Gestalt Design and Construction crew that the building's total area on all five floors can be no more than 241,313 sf. Fine. However, in the process of laying out the building as well as making it look good on the outside and allowing for easy expansion later, we've found that the building needs to be 242,524 sf. And Gestalt National is having None Of It: get the building down to 241,313 or it's not happening. And they're putting pressure on some very reasonable folks about this, and the pressure is turning these wonderful people into unreasonable folks who fly off the handle at the drop of a hat. Howie and Sven and I have gone into meetings with these reasonable local Gestalt folks who suddenly start shouting and refusing to even hear us out on an idea of how to possibly fix the square footage issue without compromising the building's function or look.

So, yes. We're about to jump through some flaming hoops over an extra 1,211 sf in a nearly quarter-million sf building. We are arguing over five-thousandths of the building's total area.

It's a bean counter issue, not an architectural issue. Probably, someone who is good at estimating initial cost but does not fully understand construction costs, engineering, and making a clinical space actually work has set this 241,313 in stone and refuses to let anyone else budge from it. Sadly, in order to fix this short-sighted imposition, we'll either have to take a few inches off the outside of the building all the way around, or we'll have to engage in some engineering dynamics that will cost more than just letting us build the extra 1,211 sf. Plus, depending on how the 1,211 sf is taken out of the building, it could affect the flow of staff and patients through some very busy departments, including the one that we've been redesigning a whole floor for. Are we really "saving" anything here?

So, we have to figure out how to get this extra area out without hurting patient and staff flow or making the building look funny. And it takes a lot of time (which we don't have) and effort (which we do have, but it's easy to get burned out when banging your head against this all day). So, I'm working weekends.

Architectural grocery lists

In the recent hubbub of finishing SD for the Uber MOB, many of the departments find that the programs for their departments are wanting--some rooms are too small, others were left off the program, and now and again there are too many of some rooms. So as we're making sure the departments flow properly, we're also having to do this addition, subtraction, and massaging of rooms and spaces.

A program is like a detailed grocery list. First, it lists what rooms and spaces (and how many of each of those rooms and spaces) are needed. (Space doesn't necessarily have walls on all of its sides--it might be a wider area in a hallway, or it might be an alcove tucked in off of a hallway but open to it as well, or it might be an open area inside a larger room, which has walls on three or four of its sides and often, but not always, a door.) Then it tells you how big each of those rooms needs to be (square feet), and sometimes the program will indicate a minimum dimension for these spaces. (For example, a CT scan might be specified to be 350 sf, but the program might also indicate that the room must be at least 14 feet wide.) If it's a well-written program, it will also provide details on how the spaces relate to each other: do some of them need to be close to each other or accessed directly from one another, or do some need to be as far from each other as possible? Do some of these spaces need to account for a huge piece of equipment or need to have direct access to the outdoors? Finally, a good program will also account for things like circulation (the space needed to get between the rooms and to move around in open rooms with lots of smaller spaces in them, as well as stairs and elevators), walls and structure, and utility spaces (tele/data rooms, electrical rooms, mechanical rooms and shafts, housekeeping closets, elevator machine room, etc.).

While these programs for Uber MOB were put together almost a year ago with the users and the higher-ups at Gestalt, there are now more users in the room when we go through these plans who weren't involved in the initial programming. Some of these users are the ones treating patients every day, so they have a different perspective on how many of what spaces are needed. These daily users are the ones who provide us with real, useful information like, "the reason we can function with three exam rooms now is because we use two of [neighboring department]'s exams on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We really need at least five exams, preferably six, if we're not gonna be able to share exams with someone else." Or they might say, "By the time a patient gets to us, there's no need to weigh them--we'd rather use the patient weighing/vitals alcove for equipment storage." We the architects then make notes on the program and send those user-requested changes to Gestalt National in the mid-west so that they can approve or disapprove of the changes.

It would be easy to get mad at the users (and/or the client) for underestimating a department's needs, but programming is a gift that architects sometimes take for granted, I think. It's our job to take users through the course of treating a patient and get them to think about the spaces they use and need. It's out job to help a client think through if they do something a certain way now because it's how they want to do it or if there's something about the existing building that makes them do it that way. It's our job to help a client understand space and really know what it means to have a 7'-0" x 14'-0" storage room. So instead of getting pissed when clients say, "Oh, good Lord, we need another four exam rooms and a lab!", I try to remember that they're having to play catchup to the way I already think, just as I probably remember important symptoms at the last minute during visits with my own physician.

Everybody wants to rule the world

As we're coming into the final stretches of schematic design (SD) on the Gestalt Healthcare's Uber MOB project, we have dissent in the ranks. At least two of the user groups (that is, the groups of people representing a department and helping us design it) have flatly stated that they don't like where they are in the building. At the last round of user group meetings, they were adamant (and sometimes quite emotional) about how they needed to be on a lower floor/different floor/up a floor/on the west side/closer to the front door/on the other side of the building or they needed to have more windows/direct access to the outside/direct access to the front door/direct access to the back door. They want to be located somewhere else in this building. Now.

Um, to quote Austin Powers, that train has sailed.

When we design multistory buildings with a variety of tenants in them, we do what's called blocking and stacking. We use a program for each tenant (or in this case, department) to tell us how many square feet each tenant should be. We take those tenants and figure out where they should be in the multi-story building. And when we do that with a healthcare facility, we do that with the owners (Gestalt HMO) as well as the users (people who run or have run these departments). So we did blocking and stacking last summer with the Gestalt management as well as a representative from each of the departments, and now six or seven months later, the locations of their departments is un-acc-eptable! Really? You just figured this out now?

I suppose this wouldn't be as hard to deal with if the design and construction schedule for Uber MOB wasn't so aggressive. Any major changes in the plans at this point are a big deal and will cost us at least a month if not more. The Gestalt higher-ups are talking amongst themselves to decide if we're going to do all these big flip-flops, but I strongly sense that the answer is no. Why? Because beyond the schedule, beyond the meetings, beyond all of it, is a simple truth that project manager Gretchen articulated: "Everybody wants to be on the first floor, no matter what their department does or how big or small it is. Everyone wants the first floor, facing the Rockies to the west."

And that's the truth. And it's not the truth because nurses and doctors are rude or selfish--it's because they care about their patients and want to make sure that they aren't walking long distances when they're sick, and they want to make sure that if a patient suddenly codes (has heart failure and needs CPR or other resuscitation) in a department that they can be taken easily to an ambulance. And they want to make sure that when you tell a patient "you have cancer," that the patient isn't in a dark room in the basement but is perhaps able to look out a window at the mountains and think well, I have some options on how to deal with this instead of dear God I have cancer and I'm in a cave. And yes, being on the first floor would also benefit the caregivers and staff--less travel time from the parking lot, a nice and refreshing work environment to see the same inspiring vistas that the patients see--but it is ultimately about the patients.

Alas, land is finite. We have to build vertically so that we can get all the needed departments in one building on one site and still have land left over for parking and loading docks and the possibility of future buildings for when Uber MOB expands in 10 or 20 years. So not everyone can be on the first floor facing the mountains. Someone has to look at the Eastern Plains. Someone has to go on the top floor. Someone has to go in the basement. And we've all done the best we could to get people where they might best serve their patients while also bearing in mind that we can't build a Super-Walmart building for this MOB. So, it's probably not going to change. But if there's anything we can do to mitigate the pain of having a less-then-excellent location in the building, then we'll do it.

Hooray! The internet's back!

Guy and I just switched over to Qwest and DirecTV for our cable and internet, which means we suddenly have a crapton more channels, reliable wireless internet, and DVR capabilities for about what we were paying for Comcast. What this means is that we have 500 channels and not much on, but at least we can DVR Robot Chicken and The Ricky Gervais Show as well as some good standup, which means we may be able to cancel Netflix, at least for a while.

Meanwhile, we have a bunch of meetings this week with the user group for Gestalt HMO's Uber MOB. (O Holy St. Renzo of Piano, deliver thy humble archispazz from meetings.) I still need drafting help for all the departments I'm working on, but Sven and Howie have yet to pluck some unlucky soul from the madding crowd and assign him/her to me.

Also meanwhile, one of the kittehs here at the HKH has giardia, so we're having to treat both Hazel and Gracie for it just to be sure. This means taking a pill twice a day, or rather having a pill shoved down our throats twice a day. I was spoiled by how well Maddy (RIP, Big Girl) took pills, and so now Guy is having to play Nurse Ratched and dispense all medication in the house. Also, Papa bought us a bunch of fun toys, like a feathery fishpole, a refill for the Turboscratcher, and one of those arched emery-board Turboscratchers. Gracie is finally playing with the regular Turboscratcher, but she fears the Emeryscratcher, and she is utterly paranoid of the Feather Fisher, though Hazel wuvs it and played with it (and Papa) for twenty minutes straight last night. As Guy said afterwards, "I don't think I've ever seen her that active in the ten years I've lived with her."

I'm slowly going through my closet to organize and clean it out, as Guy bought me a closet organizer for Xmas (which I asked for, don't get offended). I want to paint my closet before he installs it though, so I'm a) thinning the herd and b) girding myself mentally to overhaul my closet, right now when I can barely make myself Swiff the house and do laundry. Updates will be provided as conditions warrant.

Wish in one hand, draw with the other

As my colleagues and I slide into the new year and move forward with the big new 250,000-sf medical office building (MOB) for Gestalt (which they're tentatively calling Uber), we face the most rewarding and yet most frustrating part of designing a building: working with the users. When architects work on a project, sometimes the owner is the user: a single-family home or a small commercial building, for example. However, we quite often work for a client who is not the user. The obvious example of this is when we design a spec building for a developer to lease or sell to other tenants, be they residential or commercial. Less obvious but just as frequent are the local projects we do for a national company, and Gestalt is a prime example of this.

The owner of the Uber MOB is Gestalt HMO. They will pay for the building's construction (and all design and construction team fees), and they'll hire the doctors, nurses, specialists, and other staff members that treat patients in the MOB. However, the users are the teams of people who might or will work in the building, and/or who are in charge of the existing departments in Gestalt's other MOBs. For example, when Howie and I are designing the ambulatory surgery center for Uber MOB, we show and talk through the proposed floor plans to the surgery director and the head of nursing at Gestalt's Bierstadt MOB. With their feedback, we know better how Gestalt's staff will use this department (and all its other departments) and can design accordingly.

However, Gestalt's headquarters, based in the midwest, have their own set of rules and regulations and list of program for each of these departments. They even have diagrams and sample plans to show how each department should ideally be laid out. However, Gestalt Colorado does some things differently than Gestalt Headquarters, and it causes some friction. Some departments say that they don't need a consult room, or they need two consult rooms instead of one. We're not supposed to vary from the program that Gestalt HQ sends us, as those programs are based on meetings with those same users that we're now meeting with, but often the head of a department can change between setting up the original program and finally having the design meetings, and just as often the users will realize that there's an error in the program. Either they asked for something in those early programming meetings that didn't get filtered down to us, or they realize now that they see their needs put onto paper that they've forgotten something. Sometimes, the users just get drunk with power: we have a brand new building, and we're gonna make it awesome!! It is at this point that we have to explain that we're architects, not sugar daddies.

So while we're figuring out what spaces the users do or don't really need, we have to design the outside of the building along with the inside. It's a real balancing act to get the outside to fit the inside and not go over the square footage that the owner--Gestalt--mandated, while also making sure that each department inside the building is the right size for both the users and the owner, and that it flows well for the users. So if a department is undersized or oversized, it's not a simple matter of let's-stretch-the-building-to-the-north-four-feet, because that has repercussions on other floors--it might make the first floor work great, but now the second and third floors are hosed.

We're putting together a list of all the changes that the users have asked for, and we're going to submit it to Gestalt HQ at the end of the week. We might be able to talk them into some of the changes the users asked for, but we, and thereby the users, might get shot down. I have my fingers crossed, because there's really not much we can do short of a drastic redesign on some of the departments.

...aaand we're back.

I returned to Design Associates after a two-week break with a sense of anxiety and foreboding. First of all, I had practically forgotten what I'd been working on: schematic design on various departments in a quarter-million square-foot medical office building for Gestalt HMO, plus an ongoing remodeling project at the Bierstadt Building for Gestalt. After spending some wonderfully lazy and unproductive time in Georgia with my mom and sister, Guy and I got back to Denver for half a day in order to take Gracie to the vet (where she was pronounced pesky and healthy). We then spent the weekend at Copper Mountain for New year's, where those of you who watch the Weather Channel like it's SportsCenter know that the high was -10 on New Year's Eve and about 3 on New Year's Day. And guess who went cross country skiing in it? (Look, anything below about15 feels the same to me, so what's another 15 degrees?)

After lots of rest, wine, good company, and fun, I remembered how stress-inducing work had been, and I dragged myself into the office, only to find that Ingrid (a longtime colleague and awesome architect) had worked on my project and had kept it afloat and going well in my absence. Later on Monday, Howie called Sven and me into a conference room to let Sven know that I had been the subject of a colleague's hissy fit two weeks ago, and that it wasn't right that a) that colleague acted that way towards me and b) I shouldn't have to deal with that kind of crap, as I had too much to do. It was really a compliment, in a way, that Howie had been thinking about the hissy fit for two weeks and wanted to let Sven know that This Crap Shall Not Fly. It was also a relief, as I didn't feel like I had walked into a hornet's nest when I returned.

Here's hoping that 2011 will be busy but not horribly hectic, not just at work but in life in general. I don't really make resolutions (any change I've ever made that was substantial and stuck with me was made at some random point during the year, not on January 1st), but I have decided that this would be a good time to start setting some limits and rationing out (and saving) my energy a little better than I have in the past. And here's hoping that everyone reading this also has a balanced year: a little busy, a little quiet, always good.

Thanksgiving...and not a moment too soon

This two-day workweek is right on time, my peeps. After coming down off of my deadline with Orville, I have found myself feeling full-fledged burnout again. I thought I had conquered this over the summer, but I evidently only tamped it down enough to keep working. I should have spent my half-day last week painting my nails and doing nothing, but I spent it cleaning which, while necessary, also just added to my exhaustion. I went back to work to face Howie, only to find that now Sven wants me to move upstairs to sit closer to the rest of the Gestalt team (whom I find to be decent human beings but half-ass architects, so I'd really rather not move). Plus, once I expressed anything even remotely resembling tiredness, Howie asked another architect in the office (non-healthcare) to help me with the SD layouts that I was supposed to be doing because, and I quote because I heard him over the wall on the phone with the architect, "She looks like she's kinda struggling."

Yes, Senor Fucktard, I am struggling, because as soon as I get done with one big-fast-monumental-do-more-than-you-were-originally-supposed-to-do-on-this-project deadline, there's another one right on its heels, and I have no time to rest or recover or anything. So I design an ambulatory surgical suite in 90 minutes or so, then I go in the bathroom and dry a few tears and pray for 5pm so I can just go home and not do anything and not serve anyone or have to humor anyone. It's been a long month and frankly a long year, and I can only describe the feeling as burnout. All I want to do is stare at the wall. I'm supposed to take all my vacation by the end of the year, but how am I supposed to do that when everything I have to do from here on out is one deadline after another and maybe you can take a few days right before Christmas but I really need to take the days now before I throw a grand mal hissy fit at work?

So, Thanksgiving has come at a good time. I'm actually looking forward to the drive to St. Louis. Being in a car with Guy for 12 hours is pretty good, really, as he and I generally have some great conversations and make each other laugh the whole way, and sometimes we're just quiet and Guy lets me be quiet and in my own little world for a bit. Indeed, I'm quite thankful for him.

Who watches the Watchmen? Part 2 of 2

It's been a while since I mentioned the MRI project with Will. Since Will is a partner, he usually isn't that involved in the day-to-day management of a project. Therefore, an associate is the next level down at my office (and at many firms across the country) who would actually manage a project. For the MRI project, Will assigned Orville as the managing associate, me as the architect, and Intern Devon as the intern/drawing-and-printing lackey. It's a small project, really--we're putting in an MRI into an existing space and renovating some nearby offices as well. What makes it tough is that the project has to be built on a really fast schedule so that research group that's going in halvsies with the research facility can move into the MRI suite in March and start doing their research. Like big research. Like they're-on-the-cusp-of-curing-three-major-diseases big. Oh, and did I mention that we haven't even finished the construction documents for the project, and they're picking the contractor in December? And they want all this done in less than three months (Jan-Mar)?

I'll wait a moment while all my architectural readers twitch and convulse regarding those last few sentences.

So, Will puts me on the project because I've done four MRIs in ten years, three of them in the last five years. Will brings on Orville presumably to run the project and because he has a lot of construction experience and has done two MRIs himself. However, in the past couple of months, I have found that I really like Orville as a person and loathe him as an architect. I'm having to get all the engineers in the room for coordination meetings and and run those coordination meetings as well as the meetings with the users and basically run this project. Orville has done the specs for the project (eventually), but hasn't really reviewed the drawings at any point that I can tell. He comes in at ten am and calls me eventually to ask "hey, did uh....did you see...........this...this email from So-and-So...?" And my response is almost always, "Yeah. Go up in your email about five or six exchanges to where So-and-So responded at 9:34 am and you'll see our solution to the problem." Dude wasn't even in on Friday, and these drawings are due this Monday. While Orville has had some interesting comments and suggestions on how to fix things, it's like his head isn't even in the project most of the time. Even riding in a car with him from the research facility back to our office is unsettling and time-wasting--there's a quick exit off the highway that takes you straight to our office, but he's wandering all over the back roads of Denver's industrial fringes and has-been neighborhoods.

This is my fear, as un-PC as it might be to say or write it: I think Orville is going senile.

He's 67, and several years ago he had some work done on his heart (stents or something), and according to my dear friend Vinnie the psychologist, having your heart worked on in such an invasive way can really slow you down both in terms of physical speed and mental processing capacity. And I fear that's what's happened to Orville. He is quite literally acting too slow to be on this project with Devon and me. So on a project in which I'm only supposed to work about 4-8 hours a week (which is what Will told Sven), I'm working more like 20 hours a week because it's the only way to make the project even stand a chance of being successful.

So here's my question, faithful readers: is it wrong of me to express this concern to Sven? I feel like I'm being ageist if I say something like "Orville is too slow to run this project", but I feel like I need to explain to Sven why I'm not able to fully keep on top of the four Gestalt projects I'm running for him and why I've had to work overtime for the past couple of weeks. Further, I'm hearing from other folks in the office that they've had similar experiences in working with Orville (e.g., the interior designer who had to suck it up and run the client meetings because they no longer had the patience for Orville's constant non sequiturs, jokes, and random stories of his childhood growing up in Leadville). At least people like him (which is more than Howie can say for himself at the moment), but working with him is frustrating and unproductive.

Thoughts?

Contractors: the older brothers I never had, the cool kids I never got to hang out with

I don’t know why I like contractors so much. I mean, technically I should like them because they build the things I draw, and some of them build those things very well. To be fair, I don’t think I’ve ever met a bad contractor (and I’ve met very few bad subcontractors)—since I do healthcare and other large-scale commercial projects, I think that’s helped to separate the crap from the mulch*. But I just like being around them—I feel like I’m being allowed into an exclusive club, or even being allowed to observe a completely different species in its natural habitat.

We sit down around a folding table in the construction trailer at 7:30am, ready to start our OAC**. I have to do a job walk afterwards, so I’m wearing pants and closed-toe shoes, but I’m still dressed like I have a white-collar job. The contractors with whom I’m working on the Gestalt main floor renovation, Glasnost Construction, range in ages from late-20s to mid-50s. Leaning on the table with wide, tanned forearms, looking intensely at the meeting minutes and each other, Gestalt baseball caps covering the hair that’s been plastered down by hard hats for almost three hours already***, the various superintendents, foremen, and project engineers look like giants compared to me. Their XXL t-shirts stretched over barrel chests and chiseled biceps and 36- to 38-inch inseam jeans lapping over size-14 Redwing work boots belie a seemingly-unspoken hiring rule at Glasnost: you must be at least 6’-0” tall and 240 lbs to run a project. I’m not even kidding: the shortest contractor on my jobsite is the project engineer, Vlad, and he’s 6’-0” tall and in his early 30s, while the other three are 6’-2” (Boris, late 40s), 6’-5” (Ivan, early 40s), and 6’-7” (Yuri, late 20s). (The Glasnost project manager, Darko, is maybe 5’-9” and in his 50s, but he’s worthy of his own post, that guy.)

The size and cultural difference is most noticeable in the field. After the OAC, we walk around the parts of the main floor of the Bierstadt building under renovation. As we approach the job site, Yuri hands me a pink hard hat. “It’s not a statement about you, Pixie,” he says. “It’s just the only way we can guarantee that none of the other guys will wear your hardhat and get their head funk in it.” I tighten it down onto my head and walk into what looks like a street scene in Iraq—fluorescent lights hang crookedly while sparks fly from someone welding support steel for a coiling door across the room. I can look straight up to see wires, ducts, and even the underside of the next concrete floor above us. As I lift my leg to step over some construction debris, Ivan steps down onto it to flatten it out so I don’t have to step so far. I ask to look into a portion of the exterior wall that’s about eight feet above the floor, and someone produces a ladder. As I climb up, two large men hold the bottom—it’s overkill for stabilizing a ladder for someone barely over 120 lbs, but it’s very kind: don’t let the little architect fall. As Yuri and I take measurements of an undocumented fire extinguisher cabinet (we’ll have it deported the next day), a drywaller across the room lets loose with a string of F-bombs. Boris takes two steps towards the man and silences him with an icy glare: watch your mouth, there’s a lady present.

It’s educational and downright fun sometimes to hang out with contractors. You listen to them talk about past projects and problems they had on those projects and how they solved them. You even hear them describe, sometimes unintentionally, what makes a good carpenter/plumber/electrician/painter/whatever. You hear them gossip about other clients, even people they haven’t worked for. Turns out my Glasnost crew at Gestalt have friends who worked at MHRC back when I was working with Squidwort, and they heard what I saw firsthand—a research clinic with a lot of money and the entire management eating bowls full of crazy for breakfast every morning. I’ve found overall that the best way to work with contractors is not to assume that they’re always right or always wrong. They’ve seen some stuff, and you’ve seen some stuff, and between the two or three or twelve of you, you can find a way to solve anything.

*I hesitate to say the men from the boys, as I’ve met some good women contractors and carpenters. They’re few and far between in commercial work, but they do exist. My mom is one of them.

**“OAC” is short for “Owner-Architect-Contractor meeting”, which are held periodically to discuss progress on a project, bring up present or future concerns, discuss the best solution for intractable problems, and so on.

***In renovation projects where the building has to remain operational, contractors will often start work very early in the morning to get noisy stuff out of the way, like core drilling. Plus, starting early in the morning allows them extra time in the afternoon to fix something in case there’s a problem.

Will no one take this cup from my lips?

In between answering RFIs and checking shops for Gestalt, doing the kick-off meeting and facility tour for the new project with Will, and performing a code study for a church renovation and addition project for Sven (don't ask), I'm still getting calls and emails from vendors and product reps, all trying to get in to do AIA seminars. And I do. not. have. time. for. this. Saralee ultimately turned it down, having done it once and also having just started back at Design Associates last week. I asked our new admin assistant, who used to coordinate the seminars at her previous firm, and she said she was so loaded down with stuff to do that there was no way she could do it. I asked another admin assistant, and she said she could maaaaaayyyyyyyybeeeeee do it, depending on what her workload is like from week to week.

Last week, Will observed that we were probably going to have to make somebody take this on; it was highly unlikely that we were going to get someone to volunteer. It's about 2 hours a week worth of work, but it's mostly that the responsibility is scattered and intrusive on regular billable work. For example, I have to email the Thursday presenter on Wednesday morning to let them know how many people will be attending on Thursday...but my Wednesday mornings are absorbed by 9am OAC meetings with Gestalt, so I'm out of the office for at least two hours every Wednesday morning, and I'm getting ready for that meeting in the hour before the meeting. And believe it or not, but that two minutes needed to email the presenter is just one more damn thing I gotta do in an already-booked morning.

Part of the problem is that Design Associates' powers-that-be think that an architect (or architect-like person) should be in charge of the seminar coordination. The problem with that is that a billable person is suddenly spending time doing non-billable tasks, the majority of which really could be done by someone without a B.S. or higher in Architecture. My mom could do this job, not because it's easy, but because it requires a decently intelligent person with good organizational skills, architecture degree optional. Our admin assistant who used to coordinate them at her old firm said that she used to check a potential presentation and presenter with an architect in the office, but eventually she got to where she could decide on her own if it was a good presentation for the office. The same could be said for anyone who spent a couple of months doing the coordination.

Mostly, we need someone less busy than me, who bills less per hour than me, who isn't going to as many meetings as I am. And I think that trying to get rid of this annoying, Chihuahua-like responsibility is due in part to my sudden weariness of doing pretty much anything. I need some more Fridays off, and I don't need more jobs to do and roles to play at work or in life in general. I think I've pretty much done my part for a while; let someone else prove how useful they are.

...I thought I'd never build anything again! [swoon]

I got word yesterday from Sven that I'm going to be doing the CA on the 1st and 9th floor Gestalt HMO clinic renovations. As I nodded and said thank you, it occurred to me that I hadn't really done CA since...good Lord, almost since starting this blog. The last decently-sized CA project I had was MHRC back in 2007 and a little of 2008. Good heavens, no wonder I've been feeling so out of sorts--I have architectural blue balls.

For those of you new to WAD, CA is short for "construction administration", which is what we call the actual process of building the stuff we just designed and drew. It's usually the most frustrating and also most rewarding part of any project. As the contractor asks you questions about your drawings, you start to feel as if you couldn't draw your way out of a wet paper sack, and then you want to answer each RFI with the words "Just build it already!" But you really learn the most in CA, when someone has to build what you designed with the clients on board and then drew and thought through and then drew some more and maybe even redrew a few times. CA means that you did the thing you set out to do--you drew something that got built and now it's getting lived and worked in and used. It's the natural end to a project, and when you draw stuff and work on master planning projects and space planning layouts for 2+ years and never do CA...well, you feel kinda empty.

Unless you work for a starchitect; then you just keep on drinking merlot and drawing things you'll never build and you never know the difference in your life. And that makes me drink. But I digress.

So, now I get to do CA on the CDs (construction documents) that I just drew, which means I get to amp up my learning curve a little more, and I get to feel real and useful and annoyed and frustrated and overworked all over again. To wit: Guy is dead in the middle of doing CA on the building he did with Scooby Doo & Associates, and for him, "cutting back" his time at work right now means only working 45-50 hours M-F. He has so many RFIs that whether he works 45 hours a week or 60, he can't make a dent in them. (Evidently, the Scooby Doo Disease has spread to some of the subs on his job.) But there's a silver lining: if I'm doing CA and Guy's doing CA, we finally having something in common to talk about at home...like we didn't already.

The latest scuttlebutt from Design Associates and the life of Pixie

I suppose scuttlebutt is more like gossip, isn't it? But as my Georgia grandmother, M, once said as she removed the Virginia Slim from her lips and tapped the ashes into a fern, "Honeh, it ain't gossip if it's true."

So, some of you remember that the ever-awesome Intern Timmy left DA back in May for a higher-paying intern gig at another firm, and more power to him. Well, in the past couple of weeks, the ever-awesome Liz (if you remember her from the Pomme de Terre saga) left DA to go...run a non-profit organization. For more money than architecture was paying her. And to be fair, it wasn't hard for someone to pay her more than DA was--our base (hourly) salaries are low because we get paid overtime and profit sharing, but if you've had no raises and no overtime and no profit-sharing for almost two years, som'n's gotta give. Before she left, Liz confided in me in the ladies' room that working at DA had actually been kind of a step back. "I used to do all the things that Howie does, back at my old office back east," she said. "But working for Howie, I get micromanaged and get forced to jump through intern-like hoops and do redlines, economy notwithstanding, y'know?" And she's right--working for Howie has been really tough during the recession, as he doesn't have enough to keep him busy and ends up getting over-involved in the project instead of getting out of his staff's way and letting them succeed. So, vaya con Dios, Liz!

Meanwhile, Audrey, our female partner at DA, took me to lunch recently to talk about all the intern stuff I was doing and to get some ideas for how to improve intern (and architect) mentoring at DA. It felt really good to talk about the work I'd done on the big seminar I'd just given, and it was even cooler to watch someone so accomplished take notes while I talked. We discussed how to teach and model good communication skills, how interns could teach managers, and how hormones affect alcohol tolerance. Um, that is to say, we did each have a glass of wine. Riesling. Yum.

My longtime friend and confidante, Vinnie, met me for a long drinking-and-talking session at the Oxford Hotel's bar (opened the day after Prohibition was repealed--yes!!), and he noted the confluence of Audrey taking me to lunch with another interesting bit of news. The week before we went to lunch, Guy's office, Acme Architects, landed a big healthcare job that meant they were going to have to hire a passel of well-qualified architects. Now, being that the market is flooded with architects these days, they shouldn't be hard to find. But with Winston, one of my former DA colleagues now working at Acme, Guy confided that Winston would likely be recruiting from DA's ranks. And why wouldn't he? If you haven't had a raise in two years, and you've been at 36 hours for 18 months, why not go work elsewhere for more money on a challenging project? Vinnie's angle was that Audrey was also trying to shore up the Pixie angle--make sure she knows she's well-liked and respected so she doesn't bail on DA for greener pastures. Perhaps so--Guy said that my name did come up in Acme's higher management's discussions about who to recruit. However, Guy and I both decided that me working at his firm is our "if Pixie gets laid off" plan. We've rather liked not working together for the past almost-four years.

Speaking of working, last week DA had an office meeting and announced that we were all going back to 40 hours a week. (Longtime WAD readers may remember when this all began.) The news left me with mixed emotions, as most things do. On the one hand, I had been looking forward to having the extra four hours when all this started. And while I didn't get a lot of writing done, per se, I did use the time to do errands and cleaning that I usually did over the weekend. But that was when I actually got to work half-days on Fridays. Frequently, the four-hour cut was used for vet and doctor appointments, or a long lunch with friends at other firms. Perhaps I didn't defend the time fiercely enough, but it seemed like I wasn't as productive as I could have been with the half-day gift I'd been given. And now, we were being allowed the full 40 again, and the very sound of it made me exhausted. What kind of wimp had I turned into?

Plus, whatever brief elation I had at getting the extra time was whooshed away when I realized that at the moment, I barely had 36 hours' worth of work to do. There wasn't much left to do on the CDs for Gestalt's 9th floor project I'd been working on, so what was I to do with the time? I managed to help Norman out a little bit with some Revit stuff on his projects, but then Wednesday, Sven whoomped! a big, fat, marked-up set of 9th floor DD drawings from the contractor on my desk. "Here's Glasnost's comments," he said. "And when are 9th floor CDs due?" I peeked up at him. "In a week," I replied. So much for not having 40 hours' worth to do.

So, I know that's a lot of catch-up, and that's not everything that's been going on, but I at least owe y'all a decent explanation of what's been going on. More later.

Praise Father, Son, and Louis Pasteur!

Y'all, we finally got signoff from the 9th floor OB/GYN clinic staff for their remodel. The nurse manager, the doc, and the med assistant came in and stared, s t a r e d at the plan in silence for about three l o n g minutes. Then they recounted each move in the plan: okay, patients come in here, they get weighed, they go there...gyno oncology patients go that way, their exam rooms are the closest to the waiting room... "How are we on waiting room seats?" asked the doc. "We're great!" I said, hopefully not too eagerly. They looked and looked, touched the rooms with their fingertips, tracing patient and staff paths...

"Um," said the nurse manager in a way that made me nearly break my pen in half, "can we move the shared counselors' office to here, and move my office off the windows, and then move the nurse visit room in here...?"

I glanced at the plan, though I didn't even need to. I knew this 12,000-square-foot space like the back of my ready-to-stab-someone hand. "In order to switch those three spaces around, the OB/GYN specialty clinic loses their storage room. Is that acceptable?"

"Oh...no, they need that room..." came the reply. It was in that moment that we all knew we had beaten the plan up so much that there was nothing else for it to give us. We had moved spaces around all that we could, and anything else is now just fussing, pointless activity that wasn't going to give us anything more. We spent the next 40 or so minutes talking about what the next steps are after this--casework, equipment, finishes, a few more meetings. We also explained to them that after this point--the sign-off point--there was no flipping round big chunks of program. We would now be moving doors or moving casework and sinks around in the room, but no more Hokey-Pokey with the program. We finally got them to sign the drawing 55 minutes after they walked into the room. I thanked them heartily and told them they'd done a great job with their space (which is 100% true no matter how you look at it and no matter how annoyed I got).

When they left the conference room in Glasnost's trailer and the door closed behind them, I whipped off my brown silk Ann Taylor suit jacket and whirled it around my head. Gretchen, the project manager for Gestalt, fell over laughing, and Viktor, the project manager for Glasnost construction, chuckled while looking a bit startled. "I'm gladth yew arre happeh, Peexeh," he said in his heavy Russian accent, "Buth I deed not bringk any dollar beelz to worrk today."

I cannot tell you what an immense relief that is for me. Hell, it's a relief for all of us on the design team. Here's the deal: until we get SD sign-off, Glasnost can't set a schedule for drawing prep and construction, and I can't draw the drawings they'll need to price the project and make sure we're still on budget. Without a schedule and budget, Gretchen can't give the departments being affected by the remodeling a date (or even a date range) in which they're going to have to move out or send some doctors to other clinics or what. Everything depends on the day at which walls stop moving. So sign-off allows us to move forward and make these changes happen so that the OB/GYN clinic can finally have a nice-looking and more efficient space. Did I mention their department hasn't been remodeled in twenty years?