Well, it's about damn time.

Wanda made it back into the office today, thankfully without the cold and runny nose that plagued her for the two or three weeks preceding her vacation. Howie gathered the entire Pomme de Terre team into a meeting to recap how the first round of user group meetings went in Taterville last week. (Explanation: user group meetings are meetings with the users of a project, usually with members of each department in a large project like a hospital. In these, the architect and sometimes the engineers as well discuss the layout and workflow of the department. We meet more than once to make sure we have the layout right and that we’ve caught every little requirement from the users.) Howie thanked us for our hard work in the past several weeks, gave us a few future deadlines, and then checked in—finally—about how things were going schedule-wise and staff-wise.

“Are you getting the support you need from Sarge?” he asked
Wanda audibly hesitated. “Well, yeah, when he’s not busy with other projects,” she said.
“Well, sure,” replied Howie. “With notice, we can get his help a little better, I’d say, but if all we give him is a moment’s notice, we’re gonna have to wait in line sometimes.”
Wanda wasn’t ready to shut up. Is anyone surprised? “Well, it would have been easier if we could have kept up our weekly CAD meetings, but he had other—“
Liz jumped in. “Well, the breakdown of our meetings was partly on our side, too, you have to admit,” she said. “We had a deadline we had to make, and weekly meetings were taking up too much time.”

Wait—did Liz just stick up for Sarge? She who on more than one occasion complained bitterly about ADT’s new processes? Leaning into the strike zone for a bit for El Sarge-o? Somebody better, cuz if one harsh word is said about him after he did everything he’s done for them, I’m gonna come charging out of the dugout like George Brett and smack them mofos with my overly pine tar-stained bat.

“Well, we need to start those meetings up again,” stated Wanda, shifting a bit in her chair. “We need to figure out if there’s anything still wrong in the sheets—“
“Shouldn’t be much,” said Liz. “We got core and shell redone and they went well.”
“I did the interior sheets last week, and they’re clean,” I interjected across the table to Liz and Leslie.
“When do we want to start doing collision detection?” Liz asked Howie. (Another explanation: collision detection is the process of laying the structural drawings over the mechanical and plumbing drawings to see where air ducts or plumbing pipes are going through structural beams. This is traditionally done through overlaying paper drawings from each discipline onto each other. With the new process of BIM as done through Revit or ADT, each discipline builds a 3D model in the software and plops one into the other, using the software to find the problems.)
“It should be ongoing,” said Howie. “Start now. Tell the engineers you needed it yesterday.”
I felt Wanda’s frenetic energy surge behind me before she even spoke. “We need a model from them weekly, so we can—!”
“No,” Howie said very firmly. “There is no way we can make them send us that model that often. They’re gonna build that model just for this purpose, and they’d be wasting time to do it each week.”

Wait—did Howie just shut Wanda’s frantic, almost-belligerent ass down? Oh, I think he did. And oh, he wasn’t done. For the next half hour of a fifteen-minute meeting that lasted almost two hours, Howie talked the team down out of doing incredibly time-intensive activities for the Design Development phase deadline in a few months. Wanda got loud and panicky; the stress in her voice put stress into others’ minds and it came out in their voices and opinions, and Howie talked them down. Oh, WAD Readers, it was beautiful. It was in that moment that a) my project manager finally stepped in and set some limits, and b) I remembered why I liked Howie so much. My favorite moment was when Wanda, Liz, and the guy managing the utility plant portion of the project (Thurston) all started raving and working each other up about a need for phasing plan details. We have to tell the contractor how to block off each area for each phase, what to do, for crying out loud the mechanical drawings are just lines, not the full ducts are even drawn (yeah, that’s cuz we just finished Schematic Design, you nimrods!), we need to show how the phasing needs to be done, details, etc, etc, etc. Howie just held up his hands, and lo, he spake:

“Four years ago, I remodeled an entire hospital in place. Every department was active while we remodeled it. I’ve done this before, and I did it with phasing plans no more detailed than what we just issued in this SD package.”

Oh, the delectable silence.

“I understand that this is a really complicated buildings, and I agree that we need to keep in mind how the phasing’s gonna work on it,” he continued. “What I’m asking you to do is to approach it slowly. This is a well-funded project, but it’s so easy to burn all that fee doing things like spending a month detailing the hell out of something that the contractor’s gonna do how he wants in the end. We have a great contractor on this; I’ve worked with them before, they’re conscientious contractors, and I know they’re gonna do a good job.”

With that, Howie dropped the smack. We wrapped up briefly and were able to get out and do what we needed to do. It was beautiful, and I was glad. I’m not sure if it sank fully in with Howie, but I’m glad he saw the pandemonium that I experience in those ridiculous, time-wasting Pomme de Terre meetings. And I was glad he was there to chill some crazy people out before they wandered off into Hysterical ArchitectLand.

Now, if he’d step into those meetings more often….

Bitch, you are not making friends like this.

Wanda went on vacation last week and was supposed to be back in the office on Valentine's Day. She didn't show. She didn't show Thursday...or Friday, for that matter. This is an issue for a couple of reasons.

First, Wanda and I are two of 19 members of a breakfast group in the office. Each Friday, we members take turns bringing breakfast in for our colleagues. Some do something as simple as grocery store doughnuts (though if you want to make friends you'll bring in Krispy Kremes--there's only one KK store in the whole state, so their breakfasty glazed confections double as currency in some locales) or bagels and cream cheese. Others , like moi, bring homemade goodies like Orange Bread and buttermilk biscuits with honey, butter, and jelly. No, I do not bring gravy--bring your own damn gravy!...where was I? Oh, yes, so back in January, Wanda asked me to trade breakfast days with her for some reason or another. She looked at the date I was supposed to bring breakfast and said, "Oh, I should be back from vacation by then!" I switched with her, but that meant my breakfast day was four days from the day she asked me, and I was only able to bring Orange Bread because I was tired as hell and had to bake after getting home after a four-hour drive back from a Wheatlands site visit.

Well, kids, her breakfast day was Friday.

Though being back in town for three days, she sent no emails to anyone in our group saying, oh I don't know, i won't be in tomorrow so can I trade with someone please, or something along those lines. Nope. All she did was call or email Liz at 6:30am to say she wouldn't be in. Let me say that one of the worst things you can do to 18 other breakfast-starved coworkers is let them down. It's one thing if you had an emergency. It's another if it seems really apparent by your previous absences in the week that you knew you weren't going to be in on your day. Corrine, the administrative assistant who also runs our group, sent out a civil-but-zingy email to the group reminding them to let her know if they would not be able to make their day. By the time Sarge and I got to lunch, I was ready to eat glass and ask for seconds.

Wanda also committed the cardinal sin of not letting the front desk know that you're going to be out. It's actually better for folks if you call or email the receptionist and say, "Hey, I'm ill today and won't be in; would you tell Howie and Liz please? Thanks!" Phone calls come through the front desk, and the receptionist can better direct an urgent call if she knows you're not in. If she thinks you're in, it's going to your voicemail. If she knows you're not in, she'll direct the person to someone else. Also, if the receptionist is in your breakfast group, not telling her you're not coming in puts you on her Shit List twice.

On Thursday, Sarge came down to my desk to loiter while waiting for a meeting to start. "It's some kinda CAD meeting for Wanda to understand what we did with the sheets while she was on vacation. Hopefully, these changes should leave her with less managing to do and more time for architecture," he said.
"I don't think she's in today," I said. "Might wanna ask Liz."
Sarge left and came back two minutes later. "Yup, Wanda's out today. We've rescheduled for tomorrow," he said.

So Friday rolls around, and Wanda phones it in. Sarge dropped by Liz's desk, ready for the delayed CAD meeting. Liz, he reports, was clearly perturbed at having to re-reschedule this meeting, the purpose of which is to clear up file structure for one stubborn individual who refuses to listen to her coworkers. Sarge told me later, "I have to wonder if Wanda's not rethinking her employment situation here at DA." If she is rethinking it, more power to her. She doesn't seem to be trying very hard to fit in.

Inspired by Wide Lawns Subservient Worker as well as what I've learned in studying yogic philosophy for the past few years, I'm trying hard to have compassion for Wanda, trying to put myself in her shoes and see what might be going on with her. I'm trying to have some empathy for her, because that might help me understand what I can say to her or do for her to relax her defenses, help her understand that we all want to benefit from her professional and organizational abilities, but we can't when (from where we're standing) she won't listen to reason, won't ask for help, and talks down to her coworkers like they don't know how to use the software even though they've had more training on it that she's had. Furthermore, she won't take the time to learn the way WE do things. She is the new person in our office, not us; she is going to have to learn our way first before she can change it. It's possible that all procedures in life can be changed or improved, but a lot of the ways we do things at DA are ways that work. that's why we do them; after all the experimenting and trial and error, setting up the files and sheets like this or that allow for the least amount of work in the long run and allow for the most efficiency in drawing or changing.

So, I'm not proud of myself for hoping she'll quit. I also know, though, that she's seemed pretty set in her ways, even while she's the only person in the room thinking the way she does. If she's still here when Jacqueline comes back, it's gonna be ugly. And I can promise you after watching Jacqueline versus the big, cranky contractors: Jacqueline will win.

Detail of the Week: Demolition is fun!

We architects are taught to build things, but not so much to tear them down. Pity, really; there's so much that needs to be demolished. Strip malls, deserted big box stores, the completed works of Frank Gehry...and this building I passed on the way to lunch today. It had been one nightclub or another for the past few years, each club owner painting its double-tee concrete exterior some hideous blend of colors. First, it was a nightclub with a beach theme (because nothing says "beach" like two feet of snow and 30-mph winds at a mile above sea level), so they painted the exterior a light yellow with turquoise waves. Then it was a swingin' hotspot with bright yellow and red flames on the sides. Its final incarnation was a south-of-the-border themed club, which was mercifully shut down. Finally a development company bought the building and demolished it. The plan, so I hear, is to put up some high end lofts in the building's place. Evidently, what downtown Denver really needs right now is more high-end lofts.

The exterior, as I mentioned, was made up of precast concrete double tees, which so I hear were invented right here in Denver. They can be used as load bearing walls, as they were in Club Nasty, or as a roof, as they were in this photo (taken looking up through a grid ceiling with the tiles removed).

You can see the legs of the tee coming down from the roof slab. That slab's about 2 inches thick, and each leg is about 30 inches deep. When you look at the end of a double tee, it looks like this: TT. Here's what's left of the double tees that made up the exterior wall of Club Nasty--note that there's a chaink link fence around the site. The construction company has to keep unauthorized people off the site because if the wander around on it and get hurt, they can sue...even though the boneheaded move of wandering around on a construction site without protective gear and a clue is totally their fault.

The legs on these tees were only about 12 to 16 inches deep. The slab part of the tee rested on the building's slab, which was poured separately from the sidewalk, which is why the bottom part of the tee legs is still stuck on the sidewalk. The rest of the tees are gone because they could be easily removed along with the building's slab. The top picture shows the rebar in the tees (those dark wiry things sticking out). They weren't able to remove all of the tee that was against the new loft building, though.
See the blue plastic stuff on the wall? Sarge and I are betting that pulling down Club Nasty's party wall (the wall that was right up against the loft building) opened a hole in the loft's party wall, so they have to keep water out until someone can get over there to fix it. You can see the rest of the party wall in this photo. The sludgy grey stuff is the mortar between the bricks. That's what mortar looks like on the back side of a brick wall, where you can't clean it off with a trowel. Now these two photos are the coolest, and mercifully, the last ones of this post.

The upper photo shows the line of Club Nasty. Can you see the little ledges of brick hanging over the top of where it used to be? I'm not entirely sure what that's about--perhaps the architect was moving the bricks out so s/he could make the upper floors a little bigger, or maybe s/he was just making a comment about the hideous building below it. There's also a different color of brick and mortar at the bottom of the loft's party wall, next to the weirdly-painted foundation wall. This might be because the loft building used a differnt type of brick for the bottom of its party wall, or because it used some existing brick in the wall instead of tearing it out (this part of downtown is about 130 years old). You also see how there are some stripes where the bricks are turned differently so you can see the holes in them? Sarge and I are wondering if perhaps those protions of brick aligned with some concrete columns in Club Nasty on this side. See how the foundation bumps out at each of those funny areas? I'm thinking we're right--structural engineers often enlarge the foundations at column locations so they can distribute more of the load. I'm still wondering why the bricks would be turned differently at the columns, though....

Everyone still with me? Good! Well, faithful WAD readers, I'll reward your patience with this extra-long extended-rave-mix of a Detail of the Week with some good gossip about Wanda tomorrow. I'm worn out from working on Pomme de Terre all week.

Actually, it's not gossip if it's true. And Shorty spit de troof.

Miss Kitty has thrown down the gauntlet.

As Miss Kitty has refused to remove those outrageous and trashy UGA stickers from my old pickup truck, I am now forced to fire a warning shot over her skunky red-and-black bow with a little story about said wayward English professor.

When we were kids and forced to share a bed because out-of-town guests were staying over, I hated it. It's not that I minded the company per se. Kitty and I have always--always--been extremely close. However, Miss Kitty makes for a terrible sleeping partner. She kicks, she steals cover, and she talks in her sleep. An eight-hour night with her results in only about two hours of real sleep for da Pixie, cuz it goes a little sum'n like this: her foot makes contact with my knee, then she rolls one way and the other to pull the comforter off my feet, then she mumbles something incoherent. I turn over to try to ignore her. Bad mistake: I get a foot in the ass and all blankets are removed from my torso. Then she mumbles something else.

Sometimes kids grow out of this. Our Kitty, alas, did not. In college, we had to share my bed when guests stayed in hers one holiday weekend. Within fifteen minutes of lights out, the rumpus began.

Kick.
Grab.
Punt.
Yank.

I yanked the blankets back from her linen-greedy paws and rolled over onto my back. She got still, and just as I was about to drift off to dreamland....she sits up in bed. She sits up, leans over her knees, pauses, and says:

"Needs more sauce."

WHUMP! She collapsed backwards again and didn't. move. a muscle. the rest. of the night.

Meanwhile, on the other half of an increasingly too-small bed, inquiring minds want to know what the fuck needs more sauce and why was this the moment to share this revelation. Asking her this the next morning provided no solutions.

"I said what?" Kitty asked.
"Needs more sauce," I replied. "What the hell were you dreaming?"
"I didn't have any dreams last night," she said. She gave me a skeptical grimace. "What did I say? 'Needs more sauce'?"
"Yes. Evidently, we were in need of sauce last night, or at least more of it."
Kitty shook her head. "I don't remember saying that."

She did it again when I was home alone for Christmas before Guy was able to fly into town for the weekend. We were snuggled up under her homemade quilts, listening to the rainfall outside and NPR on her little radio, and about four in the morning, she turned over, held up a hand and said, "Well, if it's not gonna work they need to try something else."

I stirred. Renee Montagne was on NPR talking with a guest about a recipe for holiday cheese balls. "If what doesn't work?" I asked.

No answer. The Mystic Oracle of Random Bullshit was done for the morning.

If it gets any cuter in here, I'm gonna barf.

I can barely move right now after getting my Valentine's Day present. Oh, get your minds out of the gutter...Mile High Guy bought me flowers and a big box of special edition Godiva truffles, and we just got back from dinner from the Italian restaurant two blocks from our house. Chianti + garlic rolls + calzone = Jabba-the-Hutt-sized sloth. And I still haven't broken the seal on the truffles. Eh.....

I also got a box of goodies from my wonderful sister with impeccable taste, Miss Kitty. She sent me a box of shirts for which she no longer had any use, some never or rarely worn. Wintersilk, Rave, Bebe...all good names with super-awesome taste. I love shopping at Miss Kitty's House of High Fashion and Tastefull Accessories. She also sent me a huge chunk of divinity. Those of you from the South know the white sugary-and-pecan goodness that is divinity. Those of you who don't: it looks like spray-on fireproofing, pulls apart like non-expansive caulk, and tastes like candied heaven.

She also sent along a few shirts our mom got us at a JC Penny sale, such as this hooded goodie:

Backstory is required here. Since I was eight years old, I have always been a Hello Kitty fan. As a girl, I had HK stickers and notebooks and purses and markers andeverything cute I could buy with my savings. In grad school, I used HK notebook paper to take notes in all my classes--hey it kept the rest of those class-skippin' mofos from "borrowing" my notes when they were too hung over to make our 9am Advanced Structures class. As a graduation present, Miss Kitty gave me an HK cordless phone, which I still use. Nothings as funny as watching big, hulking Mile High Guy walk around the house and talking on my cheezy-ass pink Hello Kitty phone. So, Mom's just keeping the pride alive. She also got me this shirt:

For my 16th birthday, my dad gave me a 1991 Ford Ranger with only 52 miles on it. In 2006, I sold it to Miss Kitty with 126,000+ miles on it. It was in decent shape, but I had to sell it because it's a standard cab pickup, and Guy is too big to comfortably fit in it for longer than a twenty-minute trip. You Chevy luvvahs can make all the jokes you like, but that little truck saw me through six years of school, two shitty boyfriends and an oversized husband, and several odd summer jobs. She drove between Small Town, GA and Denver twice, once when I moved there after grad school and once to come home and stay with Miss Kitty, who evidently thinks it's cute to put UGA stickers on my poor truck. No wonder it's in the shop again. If she continues to torture my poor Boo-Boo the Wonder Ranger, I shall be forced to tell everyone a goofy story about her.

One word, Kitty: Sauce.

Prodigal Detail of the Week

Since Wandering Author's question about fireproofing in the World Trade Center, I've been thinking about this detail. I found this one in an office building built by our office a few years ago. Those C-shaped things in the walls are metal studs. If you do your own remodeling projects at home, you'll use wood studs, which would be drawn in this detail as a rectangle with an "x" through it. While wood studs can be treated with fire-retardant chemicals, metal studs are used more often than wood studs in commercial and large multifamily residential construction projects that require a high degree of noncombustability (is that even a word?).

Building codes dictate so many aspects of a building, including the materials used to make them. First, building codes allow an architect to use wood frame construction if the building is under a certain area (in square feet) and under a certain number of stories. How many square feet and how many stories depends on what kind of building it is: a wood-frame office building can be larger than a wood frame nursing home. Some types of buildings, such as structures that store hazardous materials, are not allowed to be of wood construction at all. Also, putting a sprinkler system in your building allows the architect to greatly increase the size of the building.

Structural systems for large buildings and buildings that require a great deal of fire resistance are either steel or concrete. Concrete columns and beams have steel reinforcing bar in them (called "rebar" in da biz) that allows them to stretch when the beams get really warm, and concrete is especially handy for long spans (this is one of several reasons concrete beams are used to build bridges--it can span 60 to 100 feet). Concrete is also naturally fire resistant, but it's often more expensive that steel. Steel is usually an economical way to support normal spans in a building, such as 25 to 35 feet.

However, steel columns, like the one shown above, are not inherently fire resistant.; when exposed to high temperatures, the steel deforms and fails. Sometimes, steel beams and columns are painted with a paint called intumescent paint, which creates water when it comes in contact with heat and drips on the fire, defending the steel from the intense heat and buying some more time for the firefighters to arrive and put out the flames. The more typical manner in which steel is protected and given a "fire rating" is the sprayed-on fireproofing that is shown above. I'm not sure what it's made of exactly, but it protects and insulates the steel from fire. It's lumpy, whitish-grey stuff, so if the column can be seen, the column is covered with framing and gypsum board (drywall). The framing-and-drywall covering also serves to protect the firespray from being damaged, causing it to flake off and reduce the fire protection.

That is all for now. Tell your friends at the water cooler tomorrow....

The vacuum of power

As opposed to a powerful vacuum. Actually, they both have something in common: they both suck hard.

Faded has asked the question more than once: where's the project manager on Pomme de Terre to notice all the personnel tomfoolery? I've said before that Howie is so wrapped up in general management issues on Pomme de Terre that he's not able to dedicate proper time to monitoring the production of drawings on it. Strangely, I've forgotten one huge factor in the Pomme de Terre situation which, or rather who, is conspicuous by her absence: Jacqueline.

Jacqueline has been a licensed architect for about five or six years and has been at DA for almost as long. After proving her professional skill and merit on a large hospital and clinic project a few years ago, Jacqueline earned a place on Howie's team to help master plan Pomme de Terre. Fast forward a few years, and Jacqueline is designated the lead on the design team for the new Pomme de Terre hospital with emphasis on design and drawing production. Right after Thanksgiving, Jacqueline (call her by her full name, none of this "Jackie" stuff) asked me if I'd have some time to do the space planning for just one department on Pomme de Terre. Now, two months later, I can't get away from it. It's like the Mafia: you try to get out, but it keeps pulling you back in.

Jacqueline has been called a bitch many times. These names have always been tossed around behind her back, but she's completely aware of her reputation...and she gives less than one tenth of one rat poop about it. And dammit, I can respect her for that. Jacqueline's attitude is that given her responsibilities and work load, she occasionally is just gonna have to step on some toes and pull rank. Not to open a can of worms in the gender wars here, but I sense that if a man acted the way she did, no one would bat an eye.

So, to my point. Jacqueline spent most of 2006 expecting a baby and finally delivered it on New Year's Eve. She plans to take the full twelve weeks for her maternity leave, so we don't expect her back until the end of March. However, Howie never specifically (as far as I can tell) told anyone, "You're in charge of interior design, you're in charge of files, and you're in charge of consultant coordination." Liz had the job of exterior building design before Jacqueline left for maternity leave, but that's it. Leslie, who like me is working on this project part time until her real project starts, seems to have inherited the interior space planning authority of Jacqueline's. Somehow--and I'm still not sure if Howie did this or what--Wanda got placed in charge of the file and sheet structure, even though she has the least experience of our team with our software system.

If Jacqueline was still in the office, she would be in contact with those of us doing the drawings more than Howie, of course, and she might even sit in on some of our CAD and project meetings. Ultimately, she would notice the personnel issues we're having right now, put her foot down, and state here's how it's going to be, people. But she's not here, and her absence leaves her team with a vacuum of power that Howie really hasn't filled and doesn't have the time to engage and fully understand what's up with the people drawing this building. A good manager, my buddy Vito says, is nosy but not a micromanager. He or she annoys you with inquiries: how's it going? Any problems? Do you have what you need? Are you gonna be able to make the deadline? How's it going? How are the consultants? How does it look?

Sadly, Howie is more likely to be an occasional micromanager than a nosy manager. Because he used to be so good and so fast at CAD, he has very strict rules as to how he wants his drawings not just to be drawn, but how the files go together. With the advances in CAD since he stopped drawing and started managing five years ago, many of his rules make things harder or they're just obsolete. He insisted that we do the files a certain way on Wheatlands and just wouldn't listen to my explanations of why what he was asking was going to make things harder. When the meeting ended, the intern sitting with Howie and me and watching our heated debate like a tennis match asked me, "So, um, what are we gonna do?" I looked at him, cocked an eyebrow, and said, "He's never gonna open these drawings and work in them. We're gonna do it our way, the way that actually works and makes things easy." My intern grinned. We did it our way, and it all worked out, and Howie was none the wiser.

But I digress. The point is, the woman who usually would be stepping in on the PdT madness is enjoying her new bundle of joy at home, and the guy who should be stepping in is so used to his smaller projects running on autopilot that he's not putting his attention in the right places on this huge project.