The worst architect in the world

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

So what would I like for my birthday?

This week, Guy and I turn 45 and 38 respectively (for those new to WAD, my husband and I have the same birthday). I have a few professional engagements to attend to the first half of the week, and then we'll be in Paris, Bruges, and London for about a week and a half. As is our custom, we prefer to take a trip together rather than buy each other something for our birthdays.

We're all familiar with the trouble of buying gifts for other adults. What do you get someone that would be useful, and they'd like it, and it's not too expensive for you to buy? And what do you get someone like Guy and me, who try really hard not to have a lot of stuff around? (Living in a condo will make you edit your possessions, though not as much as we probably should edit them.) Guy and I get out of this conundrum with each other by taking a trip for our birthday, but Christmas becomes more problematic. Usually, we either get the other person a gift card, or we send each other a web link to the exact thing we like. Yes, it's anticlimactic and totally expected, but what it lacks in surprise, it makes up for in appreciation for the effort and follow-through.

But in my personal and professional malaise this summer (for which I am indeed receiving professional help, thanks for asking, but for which I'm also trying desperately not to have to take medication), I've been wondering what I want, what I really really want (thanks, Spice Girls). A gift should be unexpected, delightful, and useful, and it should be appreciated all the time, not just on the day of its receipt. So what gift would I most like to receive?

I'd like to see my profession rise back to a level of real respect and respectability. 

I'd like to see us get paid what we're worth and not constantly be worn down by the pressures of clients that can't figure out why it costs so much to have a skilled professional design a building such that you won't have leaks, get sued, or have huge utility bills, and so you'll be able to use it for decades to come (or sell it easily if you need to do so). I'd like to see clients stop asking us to shave off our services like doing a full assessment of your existing building is optional. I'd like to see clients stop thinking they can do my job because they watched a three-day marathon of Trading Spaces. The doctors I work with hate it when you come to them with your pre-diagnosed disease that you got off of WebMD, but they can't see the irony when they come to me having done the same thing with a crude sketch they made from a free download of Google SketchUp; nothing you just drew meets any building code known to the state of Wyoming, so knock it off. I'm drawing what I'm drawing because it's the right thing to do to give you a space that meets codes as well as human comfort and ease of use. I'm not trying to draw "fancy" stuff and indicate "fancy" finishes because I want to turn your building's lobby into the Waldorf Astoria--it's because these are the right finishes for the space that will wear well and that align with your original vision of having a hospitality-like "classy" building.  And speaking of building costs, I'd like to see the contractors I work with not turn every goddamn project into design-build. Every time I insist that the finishes and designs really are going to be the best in the long run, I get accused of jacking up the price to the owner.  And I know who's gonna win that little pointing contest. So much for being "team players."

But the biggest thing I'd like to see is architects themselves taking the reins back. I'd like to see us stop writing, speaking, and designing for other architects and start writing, speaking, and designing for the world. I'd like to see us really reach out to people who have never heard the work "architectonics" and don't give a fuck who Kenneth Frampton is. I'd like to see us use words that an 11th grader would use, not because I think the average non-architect is dumb, but because we need to use real, clear language with the world if we're going to explain to them (and convince them) why what we do is important and more relevant than ever, and why we need to be paid accordingly and respected and given the space to do that work.

Seeing architecture truly own the 21st century: that's the gift that keeps on giving.

Monday Visual Inspiration: A new way to work

I recently stopped by The Desk in Capitol Hill in Denver for a pot of French press coffee, a croissant, and a bit of writing time.  It's an interesting concept in remote worindependent contractor or entrepreneurial office locations.  The Desk has a coffee shop that also sells sandwiches and snacks (and wine and beer in the evenings!) where you can sit and work for free (other than the cost of comestibles, that is). More ingeniously, it has a bunch of spaces in the back that are quieter and range from smallish open offices to boardrooms to acoustically-isolated booths perfect for recording or conducting a webinar or Skype session with a client.

More companies are going to open cubicles instead of private offices.  This is a trend overall in business, and I've definitely seen it in hospitals and healthcare settings.  The plus side of the open office is that it's easier to jump up and find someone if you have a question, and it saves space.  (Walls and ADA clearances at doors and halls take up a lot of real estate.) However, some studies are showing these days that people are slightly more anxious in open office plans because there's such a lack of privacy--one is always on display, so if a worker comes back from a stressful meeting with a client or boss or just needs a moment to breathe (or frequently in my case, if said worker needs to fart), they cannot do that at their desk.  It's necessary to go to the bathroom or in a conference room or even completely outside.

The Desk takes the open office concept even further as a workspace. Instead of having to rent an office somewhere, an independent contractor or entrepreneur can rent space in The Desk's facilities for in-person or virtual/web meetings or even as workspace for themselves and their collaborators. Space rental includes access to internet and printing/scanning/faxing services, plus drip coffee by Colorado's own ink! Coffee. I certainly found the open cafe area to be comfortable and amenable to concentrating, despite the activity around me (some friends catching up, a few people working, and a gaggle of yoginis looking for a post-asana chai for the road). 

'Tis the season to get your ass in bed

Starbucks already has its Christmas cups out in November, even before Thanksgiving.  King Soopers (the western incarnation of Kroger, for my eastern readers) had its holiday decorations out right next to the Halloween candy in the clearance bin. Target is advertising that its Black Friday sales start at 9pm on Thanksgiving Day.  Seriously, Retail America: knock this shit off. Render unto Santa's what is Santa's, and render unto Thanksgiving, what is Pilgrims and other sanitized versions of America's founding.

The leaking of the holiday season into non-holiday parts of the calendar is part of a cultural problem noted by Ayurvedic and other traditional medicine and philosophical practitioners.  Starting in late June but becoming especially noticeable in late September and early October, the days grow colder and the daylight grows shorter and less intense. Deciduous trees lose their leaves, our plants start going dormant, woodland creatures start flying south and stockpiling food like they're preparing for a seasonal zombie apocalyse. By the time November comes, our bodies are trying to slow down to respond with these earthly changes...but we can't.  Our culture throws the two busiest, most physically busy and emotionally-charged holdays into a six-week span when we should be our most dormant.  December 21st--the shortest day of the year--is only a few days before Christmas Eve and Day, the two emotionally and physically busy days of the calendar year.  Who has time to celebrate the Winter Solstice with a single candle and a moment of quiet introspection?  I only have three more days to shop and cook OMG OMG OMG OMFG!!!

It's easy to point at our modern culture for this paradox of culture versus climate, but we forget that architectural progress has been crapping on human behavioral patterns for a little over 100 years now.  How easily we forget that by 1900, many large cities had widespread use of electric lights in both public and private buidings. Much of rural America finally got electricity during the Great Depression as part of one of the various public works projects in operation at the time. Even before television and the internet, electric lighting made it possible for people to stay up late and read, talk, dance, plot revolution, sew bloomers and lobby for women's suffrage, make moonshine...anything but sleep. Electric lighting plus central heat allows people to sit in separate rooms in the house and read, plot, etc. without having to interact with each other.  (Before central heat, everyone had to sit around the same fire and few candles for warmth and light.  Suckas.) If you no longer have to depend on a finite candle or the waning sun to tell you when it's time to go to sleep, then who will?  Amazon.com is always open.

Our constant going and doing at the holidays isn't a product of Target and Starbucks, though they're not helping. This busyness and inability to slow down during the winter is a long time and several generations in the making.  Guy and I are doing our part this year by having turned down 50% of our holiday party obligations and by giving fuss-free gifts for Christmas. (If you're related to us and reading this, you're getting a gift card this year.  Deal with it.) The other part of unplugging at the holidays is harder, especially for me.  Work is so exhausting that most days I can only come home, eat dinner, and watch a couple of DVR'd episodes of Top Gear and Squidbillies, when what would probably be more fulfilling and replenishing is to eat dinner, work on my crafting and art projects, and go to bed at 8:45.  I'm going to try, though, to get away from electric lights and glowing screens as early as possible and to honor natural human rhythms.  Right after this episode of Top Gear, where they make amphibious cars....

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.

Monday Visual Inspiration: How to know if your toilet isn't ADA accessible

Step 1: is there at least 42" clear outside your stall door? No?

Step 2: Well, are there any grab bars inside your stall, and the stall is 60" wide by 56" deep?  Not so much?

Step 3: Exit the stall.  Are you sure there isn't a path that's at least 42" wide outside your stall?  Really?

Step 4: Can you turn on the water at the sink with the equivalent of a closed fist?

At least one of the sinks, anyway?

Step 5: Is the top of the sink surface at no more than 34" off the floor, and there's clear space under the sink, and the sink apron is no more than about 6" deep, and the pipes are protected from you hitting it with your knees in a wheelchair?

Hmm, then maybe you really do need to go to the toilet room marked "accessible" in this shopping center.  This toilet room definitely doesn't meet your needs.


I see separate accessible toilet rooms in a lot of retrofitted buildings, and while I appreciate the effort, it still creeps me out that if I have even the slightest disability, I have to go to a separate room.  ADA requires that persons with disabilities have an "equivalent experience" in places like zoos, aquariums, movie theaters, and even office buildings.  They can't not be able to use the space, but they have to be able to experience all the functions and educational content, entertainment experience, etc. from whatever limited spaces they can occupy.


But what that often means in retrofitted buildings is that people in wheelchairs get a entrance on the icky-shady side of the building, or even in back.  They get a weird separate toilet room that's not always near the other toilet rooms.  They still get to enter and operate the building, and they still get to go pee, but it's not quite the same.  Like sitting in a chair isn't enough difference already, they have to go to a different entry or floor or part of the building to get their most basic needs met.  It's almost like...separate but equal.

Monday Visual Inspiration: Attack of the modern unisex public bathroom

Public bathrooms fascinate me for many reasons.  They are places that seem so detail-oriented yet so half-assed--elegant hands-free fixtures and Ann Sacks tile in a room that more often that not doesn't actually meet the ADA clearance requirements.  It's a room in which we are most human and most private, yet the guy that has to come in after us knows just exactly what we've been up to.  I could do countless posts on bathrooms, but I'll start with just one, showing lovely pictures of an almost-acceptable toilet room in Cherry Creek.

The toilet is beautiful, and the flushing mechanism is simple (the stainless steel panel above it), but I'm not sure how as a person in a wheelchair I'm supposed to reach it with the toilet in the way.  How am I supposed to get on the can in the first place with only a side grab bar, and not a back grab bar as well?

Let's look at that sink a little better.

 Wow, that's a true hands-free faucet, and there are little smooth stones in the sink basin.  Squee!  WANT!

 This door is crazy cool.  The glass panels are frosted, so you can neither see in or out, but it lets light in for a less claustrophobic potty-going experience.

The lighting in this room is really nice and flattering to anyone using the can or the mirror, but that grey square on the left is an exhaust vent absolutely caked with lint.  Can someone bring a Swiffer cloth in here once a month, please?

Necessary evils

I was recently asked to assemble a program for a small hospital in a rural Western town, much to my delight. I like talking to the users (the people that actually work in and use a space/department/building) and then putting together a list of needed spaces and how big the spaces should be. (That list is called a program.) It's a funny thing to break down something as complex as a hospital into a simple list of rooms and sizes--these spaces all work together in different ways, depending on the size and type of facility. One hospital needs the surgery pick-up near the inpatient nurse station so that post-surgery patients can be watched by the after-hours staff, while another hospital needs a completely separate surgery pick-up from the inpatient functions because they have the after-hours staff to monitor it and don't want to creep out the visitors coming to visit any inpatients.

So having met with the hospital nursing staff, I go back to the office and start assembling the program. I go through the notes I took during the staff meeting. I'm working on the program for the emergency department, which is a department in which truly life-and-death decisions are made and work is done. I look at the notes: body holding room, 80 sf. Not everybody makes it out of the ED on their feet or to a patient room. Sometimes it's too late where they get there. Sometimes they arrive at the ED only for the staff to find out that they have a DNR* order.

A holding room, also in my notes, is different from a body holding room. Not everyone comes into the ED with all their faculties and can explain where it hurts, what happened when the pain started. Sometimes the chemicals--legal or not--flowing through their veins make it impossible to calm the patient down and solve the problem. Sometimes they have to be left in a room they can't damage while the chemicals run their course. Sometimes the problem isn't chemicals but the lack thereof--someone stops taking his or her antipsychotic meds and is suddenly threatening their 75-year-old mother with a knife, accusing her of working for Al Qaida.

I notice the words social worker office in my notes. Not everybody who comes to the ED does so because they fell out of a tree or have appendicitis or a possible heart attack. Some people come in with black eyes and bruised arms, and the only explanation the staff gets is, "she fell" or "he tripped." Sometimes a random x-ray reveals that a leg has been fractured several times and set wrong, no one treated the fractures. It's a vacant look, a healing split lip, a bruise covered by a sleeve too late to be hidden from the triage nurse, a flinch when the person who brought the patient in talks loudly or gestures broadly. The staff exchanges looks and nods, like third base coaches wearing scrubs, looks that say to each other silently: not on our watch. A call goes to the social worker, and then they get the cops on the phone.

When I draw and design these spaces later, the details emerge: locate the body holding room near a back corridor to the ED, provide impact-resistant drywall in the holding room with lockable cabinets, provide one-way glass from the social worker office into the playroom/conference room. We'll talk with the staff some more in a few months and hear the details of how they deal with the worst days of someone's life, over and over: we need to make sure they can't break the light fixture and stab someone with the light lens; we need some shelves to put stuffed animals on for pediatric patients; can we get a shower in this toilet room? Sometimes women have been...assaulted, and they need to, um, take a shower after their exam. And we need a cabinet to store some clothes in, because we have to give their clothes to the police. We need a quiet room for them to wait in for someone to pick them up. We can use that same room for bereavement, when someone comes to identify a body in the holding room.

For now, these are simple room names, two or three words with a number next to them: 80sf, 100sf, 60sf. A cost estimator will think about the finishes and quality of materials in these rooms. They'll be priced and added up, and the hospital will be told what it will cost to build their new facility, and the hospital will figure out if they can afford it or not, or how much can they afford right now. They will have to remove the emotion from the program, from the project, in order to make good decisions for both the short- and long-term. They'll meet and discuss the building in abstract terms in a conference room, and then the staff will go back to the ED to stitch up a suspicious cut over an eye, back to the patient wing to change a bedpan for a helpless father of four, pack to the imaging suite to explain to a woman and her husband that there's something bad about the lump the mammogram picked up, back to the clinic to say that we need to run an HIV test on your 14-year-old child...

...back to tell the grandfather that he can still do woodworking if he takes his meds and does his physical therapy, back to see that the 17-year-old's kidneys appear to be working since the surgery, back to tell the couple with four miscarriages that this one looks like it's staying and she's made it to the second trimester...back to looking at the worst and the best of the average daily human experience.

*DNR = Do Not Resuscitate: do not give life-saving measures to a patient or try to revive them if their vital signs fail.

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

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

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

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

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

Do you want to know what the Matrix is, Neo? It's annoying.

I've been having a helluva time figuring out what to post on these days, the whole anonymity thing notwithstanding. I think what's making it harder to post is that what I do for a living is so all-consuming that I can't get out of it. I can't turn it off, I can't stop thinking about it, and it's so big and all-encompassing that I can't even figure out how to explain it anymore. Just as Morpheus told Neo that it was easier to show him what The Matrix is rather than explain it, I have a hard time explaining how anything and everything going on in the world affects and is affected by architecture.

Today at work, some of us were discussing the repercussions of bariatric design. Bariatrics is the branch of medicine that deals with treating weight management issues, usually those who are overweight or obese. Because more and more Americans are becoming overweight and obese, everything in the buildings we build (or remodel) have to be designed to hold heavier people--beds that are five feet wide and hold 800 lbs, steel toilets that are two feet wide in order to keep flab from falling over the sides of the can, chairs that are the size of small sofas made with steel frames. We hear about wall-mounted toilets getting ripped off of walls in existing facilities because extra-large people sit down on them. Here's the thing: the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) design guidelines require that the centerline of toilets be 18" from the sidewall with grab bars, but you can't locate a bariatric toilet that closely to a wall, and frankly no grab bar will hold someone who is pushing six bills. But, ADA is a federal law--so who wins when I build a patient floor that treats bariatric patients? Reality or federal codes?

I don't mean to pick on the super-obese; this just happens to be a conversation that I had today with a few fellow healthcare architects. But you see my point: everything that happens in the world affects architecture, and the things I do affect how people live their everyday lives. Modern architect Richard Neutra used to say that he could design a house that would cause a couple to get divorced within a month of moving into it. If that sounds far-fetched to you, try getting ready for work every morning while sharing a single sink and vanity in a cramped bathroom with poor air circulation and no humidity control. It'll have you thinking "Divorce, hell--bullets are cheaper."

My job entails looking at my drawings and understanding all the pros and cons of actually building what I just drew. Because I spend my day troubleshooting and understanding what does into a space or a building, it's a skill that I find I can't turn off. Everywhere I look, I know what's in the walls, what's making the water go through the espresso machine, how much that glass window costs, what that stain is on the ceiling, why the flooring is bubbling, and so on. Even sitting on my balcony at night, just resting, I can look into the apartments across the way from us and watch people fumble over poor ergonomics in their kitchens, adjust the furniture in their living rooms, wrestle with computer cords at a desk placed for some ungodly reason in front of a west-facing window. The world is a never-ending barrage of built flotsam and jetsam, put together in endless combinations that make sense in their efficiency as well as their inefficiency.

Being an architect is like being able to see The Matrix. And when you can't just shut it off, it makes you want to drink. Pass the Riesling.

Monday Visual Inspiration: The Big Easy, night and day

New Orleans is not without its charms outside the French Quarter. All throughout the main part(s) of town, including the part with Tulane on the west/north side and the central business district on the east/south side, streetcars run pretty regularly to get you around. While it was reliable, safe, and comfortable transportation, it didn't appear to be quite as expedient as a bus system. The poor drivers seemed to spend a lot of time explaining to tourists that they need exact change and here's how you put the ticket into the fare-system-thingy, and so on. We saw mostly visitors on it, but locals not in a big hurry (i.e., running late or on a tight schedule) also used it in decent numbers. I'd say the tourist-local ratio was about 70-30 in the city and 40-60 in the outlying areas.

The rest of the city has a distinctly different feel than that of the French Quarter. After the Louisiana Purchase, the Catholic French/Creole/Haitian citizens of NOLA were annoyed at the now-in-charge-sorta-kinda English-Puritan WASPs showing up to rain on their already-humid parade. Canal Street, the setting of a couple of the photos below, is the western/northern border of the French Quarter, and it is the point at which the flavor changes. All the street names change, like from "Bourbon" and "Chartres" and "Royale" in the FC to "Carondelet" and "Camp" and "St. Charles", respectively.The buildings take on a distinctly more modern look and feel, though I mean "modern" in terms of "from the past 80-100 years". New Orleans doesn't know or care, it seems, what year it looks like there, as long as it's not a year before about 1998. It threw me off, I think, to see so many buildings and spaces from the past without any real allusion to the present. Of course, I was also in the more touristy areas, which may have something to do with that look and feeling

Monday Visual Inspiration: At home in the French Quarter

This will have to be the first of three posts regarding our trip to New Orleans last month. It was a nice enough town, but I think I saw all I wanted to see of it for a while. Maybe if I hadn't smelled sewage the first morning I woke up there and then gotten food poisoning at one of the nicest restaurants in town, I might have had a better impression of the place. I'm sure plenty of people have worse opinions of Denver.

So...the houses in the French Quarter. Amazing. I don't know what the insides look like, but the outsides are pretty cool. Evidently, New Orleans' soil is so sandy and geologically young that structures sink and settle constantly (more on that when I show you the graveyards). There are entire businesses in NOLA that do nothing but help you replumb your house when it settles so much (and so unevenly) that a door you shut yesterday suddenly gets stuck against the floor, four inches away from its frame. You might be able to see some of those uneven window and door frames in these images. Also interesting was how close everyone's front door/windows are to the street--they're always closed with blinds. What gives? Guy and I wondered. A tour we took later on in the weekend provided the explanation: back in the 1700s, the streets on which we (and the early settlers) walked were the "back" of the house. Your real front door was the courtyard in the inside of the city block. Many of these houses had little gates and paths that you used to access the real "front door" of the house. What is now the street was a muddy path wide enough for a couple of horses to slop down, lined on each side with a narrow raised wood walkway, much like you can see in photos (and movies) of the Old West. Today, occasionally a homeowner has acknowledged the shift between front and back, public and private, but many have chosen to leave their homes' access and arrangement as it was nearly 250 years ago. (And the fact that any of this is standing is a bit of a surprise to me, between the humidity and the hurricanes, but we also learned that the French Quarter was built on the highest land in NOLA, which allowed it to survive floods better than any other part of the city.)

Some post-Earth Day thoughts

Yeah, I know, an architect musing on Earth Day and the responsible use and preservation of the environment. Building construction uses exorbitant amounts of energy and resources, and we're all looking for ways to be more environmentally-conscious with what we build and how we build it. It's the kind of thing that makes me think about my Mom.

My mother is possibly the most unintentionally-environmentally-conscious person I know. She had fixed and repaired cars with her own two hands over and over. She has repaired small appliances and mechanical items numerous times, scavenging parts from one machine to fix another. She gave my sister a vacuum cleaner back in the 90's to use in her college apartment. When Miss Kitty took it to a repair shop, the technician informed her that it was actually made up of three different types/brands of vacuum cleaners--behold the FrankenVac. (At Mom's and El Seebeno's farm, they mow the lawn with FrankenMower and Bride of FrankenMower.) My mother used wood scraps off a job site to make beds for Kitty and me when we were young (after she and Dad divorced and she had little to no furniture), uses other scraps of wood and tin from home repairs and roof patches to make sheds, doghouses, bird feeders, and St. Thomas knows what else. She uses fabric that other people give her to make clothing and linens for herself, her family, and for anyone else who might be looking for a particular garment or other cloth item (tote bags, tablecloths, etc.). She and I have used the same cardboard box to ship stuff to each other twice each. (She finally put the box in the compost heap when she received it a few weeks ago. It was pretty beat to hell.)

The thing is, Mom did all of these things out of economic necessity. Driving into town cost time and gas money, and buying another yard/sheet/box of something was more money. If she could make do with what she had, be it fresh or leftover materials, then she would. She was and is the ultimate recycler/repurposer. I think about this as I look across the room at my pitiful exercise ball, which Someone Furry With Sharp Little Claws decided to pounce on last week while I was doing crunches, causing it to release air with a sickening wsssssh as I tried to polish off three more reps. An online search for repair materials revealed that an exercise ball repair kit is $24, while a new ball is $19. Really? So it's cheaper for me to put this ball in the landfill rather than fix it? Are you kidding me?

It's the same thing with a blender I've had for about 13 years now. To get it fixed, I have to drive to the nearest KitchenAid repair shop in Denver, which is a twenty-minute drive via interstate and four-lane city roads (they won't ship you repair parts). The last time I had it fixed, the repair guy said, "Okay, I've patched it up again, but after this...I dunno..." REALLY?! I'm driving way out of my way to bring you some business (however small it may be), but you might even refuse to fix it when it messes up again in three or four years? There's a mall within walking distance from my house where I can go and buy a new KitchenAid blender--is that what you're implying I should do, sir?

Until our culture and economy makes it cheaper to fix rather than replace, we're going to be hard-pressed to really embrace Earth Day every day, not just on April 22. The saying is "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle." I'm trying to reuse as much as I can, but it's awfully hard when "Replace" is so much less expensive and less hassle.

Random picture for your mid-week enjoyment

Take a break, find somewhere quiet to sit, and enjoy a rainy early-autumn evening in Knoxville, TN. This little park just off of Market Square in the old part of downtown takes the place of a demolished building. I have to give grand mal props to whatever person or entity elected to fill this space with space and not building. The little trees in this courtyard streeeeeetch up to find some sky between the narrow three- to four-story buildings on each side and provide some shade and respite to those wandering through to the alley and business beyond, or to the waitstaff taking a smoke break from the restaurant on the right (where the concrete ramp is).

Demolition and memory

I recently got a text from my sister recently in the form of a photo. It was of a pile of rubble and a few small pieces of mechanical equipment, and in the foreground was a chain link fence that said "WELCOME TO BOOGER COUNTY ELEMENTARY VISITORS PLEASE CHECK IN AT OFFICE." I called her quickly and left a message, and she called me back moments later to explain: yes indeed, Kitty's and my old elementary school had been demolished in the past week. A new elementary school had been built in the past few years, and I had heard somewhere that the county government was going to take the old elementary school over to use as city and county offices, storage, and some community-center-type uses. Evidently, this was not to be.

Architects spend their lives learning how, what, and why to design things to be built. Secretly, though, we're fascinated by demolition--watching the tearing down of something is mesmerizing and downright incredible, and I know we're not the only ones. When Glasnost Construction announced at a recent OAC meeting for my project at Gestalt's Bierstadt building that they would start demolition of a few areas next week, nearly everyone in the room--clients, architects, project managers, and engineers--exploded with an excited "I wanna knock something down!!" We all love on some strange level to destroy something, as if we were all mortal incarnations of Kali: the goddess of destruction and resurrection. It's as if we know that once we knock something down, we make room to build something new, even if that new space only becomes an open space or park.

When Kitty and I were kids, Dad used to say that it was weird to drop us off at the elementary school, because when he was our age it was the black high school in his county (yes, kids, before 1964, the year my dad graduated from the white Booger County High School, the U.S. was South Africa without the diamond mines and the good soccer team). It seemed strange to him because walking those halls had been a socially forbidden act in his day--this was a place of separateness, of less-than. Now it was the place where all children, regardless of race or socioeconomic status, gained the foundation for a solid education. He never mentioned to us if the county renovated the school any in order to hand it over to the white kids.

However, I do know that the metal building that was the "new" gym was not original--it was added on after 1964 for sure. Moreover, I recall when the county added on a new building in the front lawn/courtyard space that became the new library, music room, and art room. It was built in the mid-1980s, right around the time when I was in 3rd or 4th grade. According to Kitty, everything is gone now from the site, even that "new" building. This is the part of demolition that horrifies me as an architect. The building is younger than I am, and it was demolished? Really?!

When we build, part of what goes into our material and design decisions is the building's function, which dictates an explicit or implicit life cycle--we call that building an "x year building." For example, the University of Colorado in Boulder dictates that its buildings as 100-year buildings, meaning that they have to last in decent shape for at least 100 years. Other school buildings as well as hospital buildings are often designated 50-year buildings or more. A strip mall, by contrast, is often thought of (and sadly, constructed) as a 20-year building. But if we assume that the library/art room/music room building at a rural county elementary school was built in 1985 and torn down in 2010, that gives a school building a lifespan barely past a PetsMart in the next county. Where is the logic in that?

I suppose some of my irateness is due not just to my professional perspective and training, but also a bit of wistfullness. When we were kids, our dad would be driving us to our elementary school and would point at a heavily-wooded area on the corner of two rural roads. Through the woods, the roof line of a dilapidated building could be seen. Dad would gesture at the hidden building and say how that was the cafeteria/gym of his old elementary school. "The actual school building burned down when I was in high school," Daddy would reminisce, his gentle Tom-Hanks-like southern accent searching for the words to explain nostalgia to his two daughters who were barely old enough to miss anything from the past. "Reckon either lightning ran in on it or someone burned it down."

"I wish someone would burn our school down!" Kitty or I would laugh. (We found school itself mildly tolerable, but the people who attended with us were insufferable.) Strange to think of that now that someone did knock down our school, down to its very foundations. When Kitty showed up with Mom at the elementary school's site on the way to a craft fair, there were just a few piles of rubble and a small Bobcat piling up the last of the chipped-up concrete slab.

Monday Visual Inspiration: Tended and un[in]tended

For your Memorial Day enjoyment, a few photos from the weekend's stroll.

Evidently, now is the season for irises in Denver. And since the pot with irises in it on my balcony is devoid of anything green, I think it's safe to say that my irises didn't survive the winter. However, it's nice to see them thriving here, just two or so weeks after we had late-May snow.

There's something lovely about English-garden wildness in the Mile High. Roses and irises take over this yard in a calculated way, as if they'd pop up even if the people in the house suddenly disappeared.

The property in front of this restaurant looked a bit forgotten then it opened, as if they'd forgotten to landscape properly. Turns out they were waiting to build a really nice patio and ADA entry ramp.

O hai! Mama went into the coffee shop for some noms, brb. Funny, the dog's leash and collar tell you that someone will be back to get him shortly, but I felt like I should stand next to this furry cutie until someone returned for him.

Another victim of the economy, a retail tenant space in Cherry Creek North stands empty. The non-native pampas grass stands watered and nurtured by the glossy insulated glazing and storefront windows, and a passerby pauses to remember what used to occupy the now-empty space.

A victim of progress: the back side of the early-Modernist Post Office with its shade screens over the west-facing windows. The Post Office has no relocated into a new retail/office building next door to the south. (And I have a bone to pick with that new building's door hardware, but that's another post.)

The old Post Office's loading dock as well as a better view of the shade screens. The loading dock is a silent oasis in a busy retail and entertainment area, as if the most important activities are buying and selling and amusing, not sitting down to write a letter or sending an important package to another human being. You are not modern, Post Office, just Modern. You were built during a time when we thought we would have flying cars and self-cleaning houses. The world would be clean and perfect and communism would perish and we would only work two hours a day because computers would do all of our work. Now we give back our vacation time to keep working, terrorism haunts us like the shadow that communism wishes it cold have been, and we have computers meant for instant communication but nothing to say.

Monday Visual Inspiration: My library's back, and I'm gonna be in trouble

Hey-laaaa, hey-laaaaa, my library's back!

Okay, that was lame, but there's a reason for my throwback enthusiasm. The Ross-Cherry Creek Library has been undergoing renovations for the past 3 or 4 months, and it's finally open! This is good for the community, but especially for me. When it comes to books, I'm a junkie, and libraries are methadone clinics. They allow me to indulge in my addiction without jeopardizing my health, sanity, or wallet (by buying books on the street--shame!!). I celebrated my favorite library's reopening by taking a few pictures.

This is the entry into the library. Not markedly changed (some new glazing and signage), but oh the inside...!

I know! Look at that! It's amazing! Not only has the inside been really transformed, but they've also installed auto-checkouts. From what I've heard, doing this won't take away jobs but rather will allow the existing staff to use their time more effectively. Hey--is that a skylight in the middle of this building?

Freaking. Brilliant. Uplighting hidden on the beams that disperse light on a bright surface provide the illusion of a skylight. I've seen this done now and then in healthcare facilities too, and it's a great way to provide light in a space.

The rest of the facility has been repainted, recarpeted, and reorganized.

Even the children's reading area has gotten a li'l makeover too. I think they're still getting the books back in there from the other libraries.

Other changes I've appreciated is that the toilets have all been replaced, and the stairway is no longer enclosed and on an "emergency exit only" alarm system. The only way to get downstairs to the meeting rooms and restrooms was through a slow-ass elevator, and now I can use my own two feeties to get to the women's room. Upon this visit, I checked out four CDs and five books. Outta the way, kids! Pixie's got a literary jones!

In regards to a previous question...

Someone asked in an earlier post about how to get rid of efflorescence, the white salts that leach out of a masonry wall when water gets and sits behind the brick face. I asked a brick rep recently about how to fix the problem.

First, make sure that the weep holes in the wall (if there are any) are open and clear at the bottom. It's helpful to make sure that there's a little bit of mesh (almost like plastic Brillo) in the weep holes so that insects don't crawl up in the wall and live there. Having cleared weep holes will allow some water to drain out of the bottom of the wall. Then, check the top of the wall to seal and/or fix any cracks where water could be getting in. After that, the brick rep suggested just letting the wall be for a few months and let the remaining trapped water leach out. After that, a brick supplier or masonry company can help you remove the remaining efflorescence. The solution is not to blast it off with a water power washer, as that will just push water back into the wall and start the problem over. However, it does involve using a power washer that uses a mix of water, a cleaning solution, and a fine-grade particle (like sand) to quasi-sandblast and simultaneously wash the white film off.

By the way, if you have questions about some weird building thing you've seen lately, take a few pictures and send them my way. Maybe I can answer the question, and if nothing else, it gives me something to blog about rather than my pedestrian life.

In Soviet Russia, survey takes you!

So here's the deal: a couple of architects have contacted me to ask a favor, and I'm happy to oblige. They're working on a presentation to an architectural convention that deals with the experiences of architectural interns and how best to work with them. So that their presentation will be fact-based (and not just based on their own experiences with interns), they've devised a survey for architectural interns. (Interns are defined as those working in the field who are not yet licensed architects.)

If you're an intern, and you're interested in sharing your experience regarding your architectural internship, then click here and take the survey now. NOW!

And send the link to your intern friends, people. The folks who are doing this survey also told me that no specific or individual information will be shared or even be identifiable--they're going to process a summary of the survey results to use in their presentation, although at the end, you can enter your e-mail address for a drawing to win an $80.00 gift certificate to a national bookstore. Squee! The whole thing should take about 12 minutes to complete, and hey, gift card, people!

Oooooh...shiny! (and well taken!)

Many of the websites in my sidebar are good for a mental break while I'm working on all my aforementioned deadlines. I've added a new one for your (and my) enjoyment: Photo Bludger is by this guy in Denver who has a real eye for interesting details in the built (and accidental) world around him. (Check out the picture of the Shaggy from Scooby-Doo action figure on the sidewalk--it's like something from a magazine. You could write a short story about it.) Also cool is that he describes the pictures a little bit--where they are or how they were taken--but he doesn't belabor the descriptions. They're just enough to understand what you're looking at but not so much that it detracts from the visual poetry.