Didn't I already talk to you people?

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

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

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

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

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

OPP (Other People's Problems)

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

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

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

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

This is where I work.

I keep wondering how best to explain what I've been dealing with at Design Associates for the past several months. St. Ermahgerd went from bad to worse to ungodly before the final deadline. I've been trying to come up with a good way to describe what made the project so hard, and the short answer is this: everything.

We had staffing consistency issues. We had staffing coordination issues. We had budget issues. We had management issues. We had owner issues. We had owner's rep issues. We had user group issues. We had schedule issues. We had reality issues. We. Had. Issues.

I've always felt like the point of this blog is to explain to people what it is that architects do all day, week, month, year...and why it makes us want to drink so much and so often. I also want to be at least fair and human, if not professional (especially given my promotion last year and the fact that a few of my colleagues actually do read this). But goddammit, I'm also pretty fucking angry at how overworked and overwrought I've been for the past year. Jimmy Ray, who has been working with me on St. Ermahgerd since late last summer, told me last week that what people generally say behind my back is that I'm doing three jobs and everyone can tell I'm exhausted. I'm weirdly relieved that my exhaustion is apparent, because I don't have the energy to pretend everything's okay, nor should I have to do so.

I'm still not sure that I'm going to be able to pull back as much as I've asked to from Howie, but I will do my damnedest to make sure I get time off from both professional and personal obligations for the next few months. And I'll put some decent effort into explaining in a hopefully-not-verbose manner all the different aspects that make for a tough project.

Well, now that that's over with...

Now that my major deadlines are behind me, I've finally had a chance to reflect on the past year-plus of working on St. Ermahgerd. This project was a pressure cooker for everyone, and it especially took its toll on me as well as my fellow middle managers. During this project, I found myself drinking a bottle of wine a week (not good, given how poorly I metabolize alcohol) and shouting the f-word at my boss, Howie. By May, when our three major deadlines were, I was using the word "fuck" or some conjugation/gerund thereof about every seven seconds. I mean, it's my favorite word, but there's such a thing as overuse.

So after Memorial Day weekend, Howie and I got together to see what we could do to alleviate my 24/7 rage and get me back to something like normal. My state of being was best described as central nervous system overload/failure, and I can't operate like that. I wanted to go home at a decent time every day, with sun still in the sky and energy left in my bones. We figured out staffing a little for the project, including figuring out who could take some of the construction administration (CA) tasks off my list. Howie also advocated for some regular three-day weekends this summer as well as taking a full week somewhere., which I planned to do around July 4th. 

I'll be posting more about what in St. Ermahgerd made me live up to this blog's name, as Howie and I agreed to do a post-mortem on the SD through CD process. I'll hopefully be able to stick to the architectural issues, as opposed to the general white-collar blues issues that plague us all. In the meantime, I'm going to go sit with my cats on the balcony and drink Riesling out of pleasure, not stress.

With T minus 96 hours to go

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

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

Pull off another miracle? Sure, why not?

So, St. Ermagerd has been understaffed for almost a year, the client continues to make changes two weeks before the construction documents deadline, and right after the hospital's CDs are due, my team has two weeks to take 76,000 sf of adjacent St. Ermagerd clinic space from DDs to CDs?

Piece of cake.

[chugs half a bottle of Riesling]

Fun with User Groups: overheard during a review of the nursery with the OB nurses

Nurse 1: ...so in the Nurse Work Area, we need a blanket warmer and a small fridge for breast milk storage.
Pixie: [sketching on the plan] Sure thing.
Nurse 2: Will that fridge have a freezer?
Equipment Planner: No, not in a small fridge.
Howie: You freeze breast milk?
Nurse 1: Oh, sure, all the time.
Pixie: For what, smoothies?
Engineer: [under his breath] I bet they taste like vanilla...

......


Nurse 1: In the exam room, we prefer to do circumcisions on a countertop.
Pixie: [sketching on plan] Right on. 
Engineer: Do you need a card access lock on that exam room door?
Nurse 1: Hmm, I don't think so.  I mean, what would we lock in there? [turns to Nurse 2]
Pixie: Maybe you have to keep the baby in there while you're doing the circumcision?
Nurse 1: [laughs] Why would I lock him in there?  
Pixie: I dunno, maybe circumcising a baby is like trying to pill a cat--if you don't hang on to him, the little dude will scamper under the sofa and you'll play hell trying to get him out.
[Nurses, Howie, and Equipment Planner laugh]
Pixie: And babies won't come out for tuna like cats will, so you're gonna have to get him out from under there with something else. Maybe this is when you break out the breast milk smoothies, y'know? 

Yes, I'll wait while you balance your checkbook.

St. Ermahgerd went on hold for a couple of weeks so the health system to which St. E belongs (and which is funding their project) can find a way to reduce the budget a little bit. This sort of thing is a fact of architecture life, but that doesn't make it any less irritating. First off, we were just a couple of weeks away from finishing DDs. DDs (design development) are great for the contractor to price, and if we gave the architect two weeks to finish the DDs and then gave the contractor a month to price the DDs, we could have a realistic number to work with when adjusting the budget. Instead, we're looking at the project budget like an abstract set of digits at which to hack randomly, like clearing undergrowth in a jungle.

Second, St. Ermahgerd has one of the biggest project teams in the office due to its sheer size and the added pressure of its fast schedule. So when someone says, "hey, you 14 people need to stop everything for two weeks that you've been doing for eight months," it's like the taking of Pelham 123--good luck bringing that shit to a screeching halt. In the ensuing slowdown, we lost two people, quite possibly for good, which will hurt when the DDs start up again in the next week or two. Some folks we lost partially--we're loaning them out, and they'll come back full time once we're given the go ahead.  But in truth, we couldn't fully stop.  Even without the slowdown, there was a lot to do on the DDs that wouldn't be affected by cutting budgets, and there is in fact some work being done already on the construction site.  We have foundations going in for some outpatient treatment spaces, and there's grading and utility and sitework going on, so it's not like we can just stop working altogether.  We got shit to do.

So yet again, the architect straddles the line of not being crazy-busy while still staying occupied and not letting the project get more behind than necessary.  Once we start up again, the schedule will slide to accommodate any changes we need to make (or so the client has assured us).  In the meantime, we're answering questions from the field and figuring out casework elevations and equipment coordination while the health system runs the numbers.  Or goes to Vegas and puts it all on black.

Better but busy

So, yes, I'm mostly out from under the cold/flu/funk that everyone's had and been having lately, though my energy is only at about 90% of my usual energy.  I'm still having to work on a bunch of random tasks for St. Ermahgerd as we barrel towards 100% Design Development (DDs), and I'm absolutely wrung out when I get home every evening. The extra travel hasn't helped.

It's the rare architect who can do all their work within an easy commute of their office. I suppose if you do residential work in a large metropolitan area like Chicago or New York City, you can accomplish this.  But because we do hospitals and healthcare at Design Associates, Inc., we have to go a lot farther to get work.  After all, there are metric assloads of houses and condos to build and remodelin the Denver/Front Range region, but only so many hospitals and clinics. Furthermore, DA's business model allows us to make a good living off of smaller hospitals, which are really in the middle of nowhere--Montana, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, Arizona, New Mexico, and the Dakotas. Getting to these places involve driving four hours or hopping in a 19-seater twin-prop puddle-jumper plane, or even multiple puddle-jumper planes.  I got on one of those heading to Bieffee, MT for a visit to St. Ermahgerd before Christmas, and I swear I saw Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens sitting in the exit rows. Those fuckers always get the good legroom.

So, Howie calls me from the road last week, sounding groggy and slow.  He was on his way to the contractor interviews/selection meeting for a 14-bed hospital project we were working on, and he was finally suffering from the funk that I had for most of January.  "Pixie," he croaked, "I'm double booked for a meeting tomorrow.  Can you go with the engineers and contractor to look at a surgery renovation at Wide Place Memorial Hospital in Wide Place, Nebraska tomorrow?"

Wow, tomorrow? Thanks for the warning.

Well, those are the wages of rural healthcare work. And they're the wages of my promotion. I'm now deemed able to be seen alone by civil society (i.e., present and potential clients) without having a partner standing next to me to point and say "the short chick in the Ann Taylor pantsuit and heels is good at this stuff, and you can talk to her just as well as you can us". So, off I went to a wide place in the road in Nebraska.  (Which was a nice little facility with great staff, by the way.  You don't do rural healthcare work and not give a huge damn about patient care.  It's a labor of love, at the very least.)

...but sick is a four letter word.

Last Monday afternoon, my throat felt scratchy from maybe talking too much in meeting after meeting or from breathing office air.  By Tuesday morning, it was clear that Something Was Wrong. End of day Tuesday revealed that I had the cold/flu/plague that was taking down scores of the American public right now, including many in my office.  It's rare that I really get sick, like bad sick, needing to take sick days sick, so I found myself unable to cope.  I wasn't totally lay-in-bed sick, but Christ knows I didn't feel fine.  So there I was, working almost-full days and only leaving at 2 or 3 in the afternoon.  We had three deadlines coming up fast, and I had a metric assload of meetings to attend and lead, so there was no staying home. I was furious about this, but I'm not sure where the blame lies. I'm sure I have some culpability for the situation--as Vinnie once said to me, "Pixie, if you were hit by a bus and in a coma, what would happen?  Would the project stop? No, they'd manage to get it done.  So go home and pretend you're in a coma."

Towards the end of the week, we got good news. The economic climate in Bieffee, MT had changed slightly, and some of the doctors that St. Ermahgerd was hiring either weren't coming on board or wouldn't be hired as soon as we all initially thought.  Therefore, the hospital didn't have to start contruction next month as originally planned.  We now had an extra two weeks for DDs, and the clinic portion of the hospital would finally have a real DD phase instead of going straight to CDs. The entire team breathed a sigh of relief.  I went home at 3 instead of 5.

My team will further be buoyed by the news that over the weekend, my cold turned into a runny nose and a violent cough which has rendered me mute. If I need to talk to Guy, I have to stand in the doorway of the TV room and wave at him, whispering hoarsely like a debarked dog with opposable thumbs and a flannel robe. According to Mom (who had this ailment over the Xmas holidays), the coughing means I'm on the road to recovery, but my throat hurts so badly from the coughing that it seems like a pretty poorly-maintained road with washboard ruts and big rocks in the middle that you could high-side on.  Blech. 

Attempting to slow down

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

No, not worn out, exhausted.

No, not exhausted, depleted.

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

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

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

Architects: the swingers of the business world

I just got back from a couple days' worth of meetings in Montana with St. Ermahgerd's staff. It was a good almost-week of meetings, but it meant I was out of the office for longer than I'm usually used to being gone. I love working with the users of a space to figure  out what they need in their clinics and departments and offices--I get to find out yet another way that hardworking medical staff deliver care and heal a small community one patient at a time. These days of meetings usually require that I'm booked to talk to these folks in back-to-back 30- to 60-minute blocks of time. Sometimes this can be a gauntlet of meeting after meeting where I suddenly look up and three hours have passed without me drinking any water or peeing. This trip was much more reasonable, though--the meetings were spaced well enough that I could get a break in between and get some water or a snack, hit the ladies' room...and check my email about my other projects.

Architects have to walk into every meeting acting like their client is the only client they have, but that's only true in rare cases.  If a project is really big--100 beds or more, 200,000-sf of building or more (as was the case for Gestalt's Uber MOB)--then your architects are very likely to only work on that one project.  At some point, a project is too big and detailed (or the schedule is too fast) for me to work on anything else.  But in many cases, I'm working on at least one other project while I'm working on yours.  This is especially true as architects move up the management food chain.  My interns might only work on St. Ermahgerd because there are so many drawings to do and those drawings take a lot of time. But as the planner on the project, my efforts are more focused and my scope is more limited, so I get to work on more projects.  For engineers, this is even worse: Design Associates might be able to support me by putting me on 2-3 projects, but engineers typically work on 4-12 projects at any time, depending on size, because of their even more-limited scope of work. It's a miracle any of us get anything done.

When we go to the doctor's office for a checkup or a sore throat, we know we're not their only patient.  Even without a glance around the waiting room, we know this. We know that our car is not the only one that our mechanic fixes. We know that we are not our financial planner's or psychologist's or or massage therapist's only client, so why do architects keep up this charade with their clients?  And why do some clients feel entitled to this? I suppose ultimately it's a matter of my profession not doing a good job of managing client expectations, both in the short term with clients and in the long term with our culture. Society, it seems, thinks that it's still 1786, and the architect/interior designer works for one person at a time, grandly hand-drawing the plans and selecting ornate gilded armchairs for the drawing room. But we are far from that--architects scurry from client to client, gathering the information needed to design the right building for their clients while interns feverishly turn these user comments into Revit models that contractors use to price the building, check the budget, and eventually build what's been drawn in the time allotted while trying to dodge material shortages, labor issues, and weather conditions. And given what we as a profession often charge for our services, we need more than one client to keep things afloat.

The curse and blessing of answered prayers

I've been going through a weird time lately, and I've hesitated to blog about it because I haven't fully gotten my arms around the feeling, the current that's been running through my days/nights/mind.  Then I remember that Kierkegaard said that life is lived forward and understood backwards, so I might as well write about it.

Every day, I've gone to work and sat down, flipped on my computer, looked at the sketches on my desk, and felt a wave of discomfort that ranges from mild anxiety to a blast of panic.  I have a variety of jobs to do and roles to play on St. Ermahgerd, and I find myself constantly wondering if:

• I'm doing the right thing
• I'm doing it at the right time
• I'm working too much
• I'm working too little
• I'm using the right people for the right tasks
• My staff is learning and feeling supported in their jobs and roles on the project
• My colleagues are getting what they need from working with me
• My colleagues and staff enjoy working with me
• My bosses (Bosley and Howie) like the job I'm doing
• I've officially reached my level of incompetence

I suppose this level of self-doubt is normal to anyone who's gotten a promotion or taken on new responsibilities at work.  I wanted to be a healthcare planner/architect, and now that I got what I wanted, I'm regularly seized with a low-level sense of anxiety about what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. The biggest question I have is the one to which I can't seem  to get a good answer:  is this level anxiety normal? How should I be feeling?

As usual, when I feel any discomfort, I turn to books. (I also turn to wine, but I'm trying to resist the siren call of the corkscrew for now.)  I found an interesting book called Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong by Kelly Wilson, PhD and Troy Dufrene, which discusses the nature of anxiety, its role in modern life, and how to live with it and be free of it.  Their angle is that you're not going to ever be rid of anxiety, but you can live life without it weighing you down and adversely affecting you.  Wilson's approach is part psychologist and part Buddhist meditator: learn to sit with the anxiety, since it can't actually hurt you, instead of instantly trying to solve it or run from it or conquer it.  Just sit with it and you'll see how anxiety is an emotion of either the past or future, but never the present--we can only be anxious about something we did in the past or something we fear might happen in the future.

Part of loosening anxiety's grip on us is to recognize and live/be in the present moment.  Part of living in the present is taking stock of where you are and what you're doing.  Part of what I'm doing, I've recently realized, is what I really really want to do: plan and lay out hospitals and healthcare facilities.  Yes, I still have to occasionally answer a question or review a shop drawing for Gestalt's Uber MOB or go to a meeting on some other random project for which I was project architect before St. Ermahgerd kicked off, but overall my time is spent doing the part of a project where my skills are most useful.  And because my strengths actually match the stuff I'm doing most days, I actually feel pretty good about what I do.  I'm busy as hell, but I'm doing the part of architecture that I most enjoy.

And then the anxiety kicks in: yeah, I'm doing what I like, but is it enough? Am I doing it right? Is it working?  And the most insidious fear: by doing only the parts I like, aren't I being lazy? I suppose the answer to that last question is: perhaps, perhaps not.  It does seem a bit avoidant not to do all the parts of architecture, the planning and the construction detailing.  But also, it would seem like asking me to do the detailing when we have people in the office, like Chloe, who are stellar at detailing and project management would be like asking a duck to build a dam out of sticks while asking a beaver to take flight from a pond's surface.  Sometimes, it's okay to do what you're good at instead of slogging through the crap that you're not good at. If you pride yourself on efficiency, as I do, then it just makes sense.

So, sometimes I feel wracked with panic, and sometimes I feel like I'm doing things just right, and sometimes I feel like there is no right or wrong way to do what I'm doing, only many ways.  I'm doing what I do the only way I know how, which is good enough for now.

Introducing the cast of St. Ermagerd

St. Ermagerd is about to own my life for the next 12-18 months. This isn't unusual--a decent-sized project can last 6-12 months for planning and another 12-18 months for construction. As the lead healthcare planner on the project, my involvement is heaviest during design, starting to taper off during CDs (construction documents, when we're making the drawings they give the contractor to build the building) and tapering way off once bidding and construction begins. I'll occasionally answer questions during that time, but by then I'm supposedly off designing another project. Or that's the plan, anyway.

St. Ermagerd is about 100,000 sf of hospital and about 70,000 sf of medical office building (MOB). Clearly, I'm not doing this all by myself. The project is a Bosley project--he's the partner in charge, and Howie is involved as another partnerish project manager architect person. (We'll see how well that works out-- the combination of Bosley and Howie on a project can be incredibly annoying with so many would-be chefs in the kitchen.) The rest of the St. Ermagerd project team is thus:

Chloe, the project manager: she's responsible for making sure everyone has what they need to get the building designed and detailed. She's doing code studies, talking to the Bieffee MT building department, checking in with and setting up meetings with the engineers, and so on.

Pixie, c'est moi, the healthcare planner: my job is to work with the users and with the various building and healthcare codes to program the hospital appropriately. I have to make sure the facility has all the right spaces and rooms in the right sizes and quantities, which means I also look at a facility's utilization statistics (how many patients of what kind use what services and how often). I then use that info to locate the departments and rooms/spaces in those departments appropriately. This is more of a process than a one-and-done thing.

Chester, the lead designer: Chester's job is to figure out how this building should look, what it's made of, and how to get that outside to look and wear well given the spaces inside and the weather outside. This is not going tone easy, between designing with Montana's climate and Howie's attempts to interfere with exterior design. Godspeed, Chester.

Jimmy Ray, healthcare architect: he'll yeah, Jimmy Ray is on the scene, and not a moment too soon. He's been helping me work through planning issues, and he'll be very helpful when we have to start really drawing how this building goes together. Healthcare architecture isn't just thrown together, and Jimmy Ray knows all the codes I do. I'm relieved that he's here.

Devon, the design intern: I got Devon an interview at Design Associates, and they hired him quick like a bunny. Good thing, as he's not afraid to push back on Howie when he disagrees with a design decision. He's sharp and inquisitive to the point of almost being annoying. However, I'd rather answer a lot of questions than answer none--he wants to learn everything he can.

Vera, the planning and exteriors intern: Vera has skills in healthcare space planning as well as exterior detailing and she's pretty good with details as well, so we need her skills in a lot of places on the project. That being said, I'm really trying to reserve judgement on Vera, but it's tough. She refuses to work any overtime whatsoever, which is a pretty tough stance to take as a non licensed person in my field. Her questions sometimes feel like the wrong kind of pushback; not like she's trying to rethink how we do things, but rather it almost sounds like she wants to avoid doing anything that takes a lot of time. Yet she does and comes up with some amazing stuff sometimes. Again, I'm trying to reserve judgement, but it's tough.

Candace the planning intern: Candace expressed an interest to Bosley that she wanted to do healthcare planning and get away from exteriors, so she's helping out on planning as well. I worry that she wanted to be a healthcare planner because she thinks it'll be less work than doing CDs, but so far she's not bad. She also doesn't like overtime, but she will occasionally stay late at the last minute to help with a deadline.

That's the main group at DA for the project. We also have Evann, our landscape architect, and Shana, our interior designer, plus a host of eternally-entertaining engineers. I'll tell you more about them as the project moves forward.

The band is back together, and we're going on tour

The recession was hard on a sister, and on Design Associates as well.  We laid off a lot of good people, and to their credit DA has hired some of them back.  Elliott was brought back as soon as we could get him, and then Kellye was rehired back in early 2012.  And now, we have the final piece of our team in place: Jimmy Ray.


Jimmy Ray left Denver back in 2007, as I was just starting this blog.  He moved to the Midwest when his wife got an amazing promotion that they couldn't refuse.  Fast forward to 2012, and her company was bought by new owners who laid her off (as well as everyone else who made as much as she did).  Suddenly buoyed by her new freedom and the realization that her job had been making her miserable for several years, she decided to go back to school to become a therapist.  Guess where some of the best schools for her particular kind of therapy are? Yup--the Mile High.


So, a few phone calls later, Jimmy Ray has a job with Design Associates again.  He started last week and will be moving his wife out to the Mile High sometime this month.  And guess whose project he's on?  Yup--St. Ermahgerd, with yours truly.  This is a huge relief to me, as Jimmy Ray knows how to put a hospital together, and I need help making some stuff happen on a deadline as tight as ours.  Jimmy Ray is a solid dude--smart, funny, gives a damn about his job, and easy to get along with.  


This is gonna be fun.

...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.

Like the proverbial cat covering crap on a marble floor...

Last week, Bosley dropped big news on a small group of us.  A long-awaited project for a replacement hospital, medical office building (MOB), and specialty clinic in Montana was finally approved to move forward.  And we're already behind.

St. Ermahgerd Hospital and Clinics of Bieffee, Montana was built during the Hill-Burton era of the 1940s and 1950s, are were many of our clients' existing facilities.  As one might expect, these facilities are now outdated: too small, too big, too expensive to retrofit to work with the new requirements for HVAC and filtration requirements, too impossible to fix.  It seems so odd that a building that's "only" 50 years old cannot be salvaged for medical care, but that's how much the field has changed since these facilities were built.  Hospitals must have separate ductwork to put a high volume of filtered and conditioned air into the building and to take it out of the building back to the air handling units that filter and condition the air.  A third set of ducts must take air from certain areas and vent it directly outside, do not pass go, do not collect $200 from Medicare or insurance companies.  Ducts take up a lot of space above a ceiling, and if the 1955 hospital you're in is only 12'-0" from the floor to the roof, well then...that's not gonna work. And we haven't even begun to discuss the difficulties of installing updated electrical, data/IT, and medical equipment.

So a lot of these facilities end up building some or all new buildings for actual patient care, and they either put all their administrative functions into the old building, or they sell the old building to someone to use as office and meeting space.  Some of our clients trade the old hospital with the city and county authorities in exchange for a site on which to build anew.  Wheatlands Hospital in Wheatlands, KS, did just this.  (Longtime readers of WAD know that Wheatlands was the project I was finishing up just as I started this blog back in 2007.)  St. Ermahgerd will be selling their old building, I think, and know they're buying a new property on the edge of town.  They were on the edge of town when they built their original building in 1940 and then added on most of the present-day facility in 1950.  They're now landlocked in town and need to be able to expand.  So, off they go to the new edge of town, where they'll be landlocked again in another 50-80 years.

Today begins a busy next several months for our project team.  St. Ermahgerd needs to break ground on their two clinics this fall, and they want to break ground on the replacement hospital next summer. And by the way, we haven't done a lick of actual design work yet, because they didn't have their funding in place.  We gave them a program and a facility size along with a hypothetical exterior design back in February, and they've been simmering and dealing with financing since then.  And now, it's go-time with extreme prejudice.  

This project will be like Wheatlands, but bigger and faster. But this isn't our first rodeo--it sure isn't mine.  We're ready for a bumpy ride, but we'll be doing it in style.  It's just how Design Associates rolls.