Permission to beat the laundry consultant, Sir.

We hire consultants for everything: structure, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning), and electricity in the building, to name the basics. When the building is complex, like a hospital, there are more systems and things for which one needs consultants, such as low-voltage systems (like communications and nurse call systems), medical equipment, and kitchen/food service and laundry equipment. The company that I've used for laundry and food service in the past was hired on for Wheatlands started out pretty helpful, but the guy who got the project after we got past design development makes me chew glass.

Skip could not seem to send me drawings on time. When he did finally get them to me, he would add walls and doors to the plan I had sent him. First of all, this is a no-no: don't fuck with the architects drawings. Second of all, if you need a door or wall added, you tell me and I put it in. Again, see rule number 1: don't fuck with my drawings. Skip's specifications (the written directions of how and what to build and products to use in the project) were incomplete, unclear, confused (like he wrote the equipment list twice with different machines listed in each list), and also late. There was a great deal of confusion after the construction documents went out because the 100% specs still had Skip's 95% specs--he didn't send me his final specs until the contractor and I caught the mistake and I had to poke Skip with a sharp stick.

Now, Wheatlands is nearly done. The building will be opening in mid-June, two weeks early. The contractors and the hospital had a sudden shock: each thought the other was going to buy the laundry equipment. We all understood that the contractor would install said equipment, but no one had planned to buy the stuff. So, suddenly, the owner's got to come up with over $75,000 to buy washers, dryers, carts, soap dispensers, and so on. I asked Skip for an equipment dealer from whom the hospital could get the equipment needed. Skip finally found me a name, but not before he groused about how crappy it was of the contractor not to spring for the equipment and how his spec was written such that it was clear that whoever's installing the stuff should buy it too. The owner wanted to confirm the washer type: two different ones were listed in the spec. Skip emails back the name and model number and said, "It's the only one listed in the spec."

Finally, the owner calls me, saying that the equipment vendor whom Skip recommended was giving them some seriously conflicting info: the washer Skip specified didn't exist according to the national distributor; the dryers were oversized for the hospital's size, they didn't actually need a pass-through washer, as the job could be done with a single-sided washer; a pass-through washer costs $50,000 and requires seven weeks to get to the jobsite, while a single-sided washer could be to the site in a week and only cost $8,500. I felt like the pass-through washer had been a code requirement, so I passed the owner's concerns on to Skip in an email.

I got back a cranky, snippy, adversarial nastygram.

I got curtly, typed answers, like, "Yes, that washer does exist." Really, well where? Who told you it did? Give me a name and number so we can call them. He told me to disengage the guys that he'd recommended and gave me a new name to speak with. The last straw was his response to my polite emailed urging to help the owner and equipment vendor work through this because time was of the essence and the pass-through washers have a long lead time. His response was roughly, "Lead time doesn't matter because the contractor has had this project for a while. If they failed to get the equipment because of oversight or plain old incompetency, that's still no reason for the owner to go rewriting codes to save a little money."

My eyes crossed. My fists flexed reflexively. I forwarded the email to Howie, who was at home with a cold, and typed one line: "I've had enough of Skip."

Howie called me a couple hours later after breaking through his Benadryl haze. "You'll be glad to know that I've demanded that Skip not be on any more of our projects."
"Thank you, Sir," I replied with clenched teeth. "What shall I do with this particular love note of Skip's?"
Howie sighed. "Call him and tell him you understand his frustration, but we need an email from him that we can forward to the owner that doesn't sound like it's blaming anyone. Talk him through his answer to each question; you're good at wording things clearly but politely."
"Will do," I replied.

I put in a call to Skip and got his voicemail. I told him I understood his frustration but needed an email we could forward on.

A few minutes later, I got an email from Howie. I spoke with [Skip' s boss] and he's going to talk with Skip about keeping his emails professional, more team-oriented, and less adversarial.

Damn skippy.

What Architects Watch

I'm not a TV fan. Rather, I wasn't historically a fan of TV. Growing up in the rural south, our house only had an aerial antenna, which one had to go outside and turn manually if one was tired of watching Alabama Public Television and wanted to watch Georgia Public Television instead. I spent most of my afternoons, evenings, and weekends running hither and yon over our neighbors fields, up and over terraces left behind by farmers several decades ago, across creeks, dodging cow patties in the nearby cow fields, and generally enjoying the outdoors in the country. When the sky grew dark and the bobwhites settled down for the evening, I went indoors and read and did my homework. Occasionally, we could get the TV to pick up Alf or The A-Team, but more often than not, it was the radio and a battered library copy of Watership Down.

Fast forward to grad school, 1998, Gainesville, Florida. I'm exhausted from 10- and 12-hour days of classes and time spent in Studio. I need a break, I need to relax my mind and not push it for a while. I need to do laundry. I got cable and started watching pro wrestling. I wrote my thesis on an inpatient mental health facility for the homeless mentally ill while listening to Tony Schiavone proclaiming that Diamond Dallas page was attempting a suplex off the top rope onto Ric Flair. And yes, all while doing my laundry.

I loved my cheeze, but then I moved to the Mile High Cit-tay after grad school, and I was so confused in my new loft apartment downtown over whether I was supposed to get Dish or cable, so I got neither. I gave my TV away to a gal who eventually moved to California. At the same time, I started dating Mile High Guy, who, growing up in suburban St. Louis and being a rabid sports fan, was never without a TV except for when he was stationed in Germany in the Army. He'd come over to my place and we'd listen to NPR while he ate my homemade tofu and spicy peanut sauce and super-sweet iced tea. I'd go over to his place and we'd watch Monday Night Football and I'd eat Hamburger Helper (which I'd never had before) and chocolate milk with Guy. Fifteen months later, we move in together in a modernish condo on the edge of downtown. I say no TV. Guy says TV, dammit. We compromise: the TV is in the second bedroom/office/den. No TV in our bedroom, none in the nice living room.

But....

Despite my best efforts not to become enamored of certain shows, I do like a few out there. Guy and I got hooked on Heroes this fall, and we enjoyed the sci-fi-yet-philosophical Kyle XY on ABC Family. As a former improv comic, I can be easily glued to Whose Line is it Anyway? as well as the animated sitcoms on Fox. But I have two hardcore TV lurrves: Cops on Fox and Deadliest Catch on Discovery Channel.

Cops is like watching a parade of dumbasses. It's pure guilty pleasure to watch people with various types of mullets tell the police that it's their mama's car and they're on their way home from a friend's (whose name that cannot recall) and they just had one or two drinks and I don't know whose crack pipe that is, officer. I'm just incredulous at watching this show sometimes. Watching Cops has convinced me that I can never be arrested for anything as long as a) I have my driver's license, b) I'm wearing shoes, and c) I hav emost of my natural teeth.

Then there's Deadliest Catch. Whenever I feel like my job sucks, I watch that show. When I hate sitting in the conference room chairs that won't let my feet touch the floor so they fall asleep, I watch people spend 20 hours a day in subfreezing temperatures doing intense and constant physical work. When I grouse about how poorly we design professionals are paid, I watch the greenhorns on the boats barely clear any pay for such grueling work. When I gripe about a paper cut from a huge set of drawings, I watch a young man fall over the edge of a boat in ten foot waves and be snatched from the waters just in time to save his life (90 seconds in the Bering Sea in the winter is instant death from hypothermia).

I've said all this to tell you that I won't be posting tomorrow because the new season of Deadliest Catch starts then, and I'll be plastered to the screen and settling in once again to get inspired by the gutsy souls who risk everything to make money in a short, brutal crab fishing season. (And I'll switch to Court TV during their commercial breaks to watch Cops. I'm not always noble.)

More food and space for thought

Mile High Guy, my husband and intrepid sports fan, showed me this article a few days ago:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/basketball/nba/03/27/bc.bkn.lebron.shouse.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

Apparently, the Cleveland Cavaliers' wunderkind star LeBron James is building a 35,000+ square foot house that will hold a two-story walk-in closet, a bowling alley, a theater, a casino, and a barber shop. Allow me to give you some perspective: my Wheatlands Hospital has two operating rooms, tweleve patient rooms, a full radiology department, a full physical therapy deparment, an emergency department, and a 20-exam room clinic in 67,000 square feet. The property on which he is building this already had an 11-bedroom house on it.

Think: what the hell is a single man in his twenties going to do with all that space? Seriously! His plan, the article says, is to become the world's first billionaire athlete. Did anyone tell him you don't do that by spending shitloads of cash on an oversized Disneyland of a house?

Now, granted that this is McMansionism to the extreme. McMansions, for the uninitiated, are super-large houses for not that many people (usually) built inside upper-crust gated communities. usually, McMansions in the same development are strikingly similar. I'm betting there are a great deal of McMansions over in the housing development at which Wide Lawns Subservient Worker is employed. McMansion developments offend many architect, including me, for a couple of reasons, the first of which being that they take up way too many resources for too few people. It's harmful to the earth, for sure.

But the bigger problem is this. The gated, insular communities that go along with McMansions deny people a right to being part of public life. Why should Mr. and Mrs. Finkley care about how run-down their local community center, YMCA, public pool, or downtown street are if they never have to go there? Why should they? They can do all their socializing at their gated community's pool, tennis club, raquetball court, etc. And why should they worry about the condition or safety of the local mall if they don't have to take their kids there to go to the arcade or food court? Nowadays, it appears that the trend is to give kids not their own room but their own suite. A recent article in the Denver Post (http://www.denverpost.com/room/ci_5540365 ) says that in the past thirty years, due to increased home size (1,695 sf in 1974 up to 2,400+ now ) plus decreased family size (3.1 peeps in 1974 down to 2.4 now) means that more square footage is going to fewer kids. This is the same problem as McMansions on a smaller scale: if kids never have to leave their bedroom/bathroom/office/play area with mini-fridge suite in order to mix and mingle with the family, how do they ever make a connection with these people who gave them life? How do the parents know?

Part of being in a family--and in a civilization--is coming into regular contact with one another. We know that a particular intersection is dangerous because we drive through it every Saturday on the way home from yoga or the grocery store. So, when the local city council has a meeting about improving our roads and making them safer, we go, stand up, and speak about how many wrecks and near-wrecks we've seen at Park Hill and Holly. By seeing the condition of our downtown, we know that the one cent per grocery purchase tax is needed to revitalize businesses and relandscape to provide on-street parking for the merchants. And so it goes. Being out in the world allows us to know what the hell is going on with each other and to figure out how to improve our lives and our surroundings.

Ah, but what of LeBron James buildng a mall in his Super-Sized McMansion? I can hear some of you now: "Look, Pixie, he's famous. He needs to be able to hang out and do stuff with his friends without the public bugging him for autographs." That's all good and well, say I, but let me point you to another basketball star, one to which LeBron is often compared: Michael Jordan. Jordan is arguably the most influential sports star of the past twenty-five years. He has incredible wealth, amazing accomplishments in basketball on the court, and a wildly successful marketing campaign that will leave him with financial security even if he decides to stop managing the NBA franchise of the Washington Wizards. He leaves also a legacy of reinvigorating the NBA with young boys striving to play basektball and be "just like Mike."

But...

Jordan has, for some reason, chosen to remain silent on social issues and, though he has been involved with a couple of charitable organizations such as the Boys and Girls Club and the United Negro College Fund, he is hardly much of a spokesperson. (I was only able to find the above info on his charitable activities buried in a long litany of his accomplishments on NBA.com.) Jordan's considerable influence on helping youth, advancing race relations, speaking up for the environment or any other social cause has gone unused. It would appear that Jordan's main interest is...Jordan.

Which brings me back to Lebron James. I hate to see James build his behemoth house not just for its unnecessary size and scope, but most of all because it removes a very important face and influence from the public sphere and good. Think with me for a moment: even if James decides to rent out a bowling alley for the afternoon for a private party, he still has to drive or sit in a limo and be at least somewhat exposed to the city streets around him, to see daily life, to see single moms struggle to catch a bus with two children in tow, to see a disturbed homeless man pushing a cart and talking to himself, to see just how dangerous that intersection is at Park Hill and Holly. And if he goes into public and gets mobbed for autographs? He should take a second and thank his lucky stars that he's in a position to be of so much influence, to say to a kid as he signs a jersey, "So how's school? Well, keep studyin', man!"

The damage is done, and his house will be done any day now, so in the words of Austin Powers, "that train has sailed." Here's what I hope: I hope that LeBron takes some of that square footage and periodically turns it into what Michael Jackson's Neverland shoulda been. I hope he brings some at-risk kids to the house and takes them bowling and hoops shooting and how to play blackjack--wait, maybe not blackjack, maybe no-limit Texas Hold 'Em instead. I hope he treats them to a nice dinner at his long, white-clothed table and teaches them to use silverware correctly and how to order at a nice restaurant and shake hands and say please and thank you and make eye contact and carry on a conversation without profanity or slang. I hope he uses that space to help others. If he will not go to the public sphere, I hope he brings the public sphere to himself. Because no one or two or even twelve people can use a 35,000 square-foot house. That size of building must be used for the betterment of society. If you're going to kill that many trees to feed your ego, it's the least you can do.

Detail of the Week: Expand your horizons...and your roof.

Buildings are big, some of them really big. When a building is big enough, it needs expansion joints to allow the building to expand when it gets really warm and contract when it gets really cold. It sounds like not much of a deal, perhaps, but when you have two 35-foot long steel beams each trying to expand one inch into each other, finishes can crack or warp or worse, the structure can deflect and cause structural failure. I found some photos here recently of an expansion joint system in the roof of a one-story building with a concrete structure and precast concrete exterior.

Here's a photo of the expansion joint coming up to the exterior wall where two precast concrete panels come together.

The expansion joint itself is a product that the architect specifies and the contractor buys and installs. They come in a pretty wide range of shapes and sizes, depending on where you want to put it and how wide the expansion joint is (the more movement that's expected, the wider the joint--this joint is about 2 inches wide). This joint is in the open on a roof, so it looks like a thick rubber half-of-a-tube with a piece on each side that the contractor attaches to wood blocking on top of metal studs. The wood blocking/metal studs are the box underneath the expansion joint bump. The contractor then puts a rubber-polymer roofing material over it (well call it an EPDM sheet in da biz), seals it down with an adhesive, and covers all edges and gaps with a sealant. An expansion joint has to run from one exterior wall to another exterior wall. This one goes to a space between two exterior panels and all the way down to the ground on the other side. You can see the tan-orange sealant on top of the panel gap. On the other side, there's a piece of spongy material adhered into the gap between the panels going down the face of the building.

When a building has a couple of wings or big chunks coming together, the expansion joints have to intersect. This is not always perty. However, this contractor did a really nice job of bringing the three wings of this building together.

This expansion joint also runs to a clearstory, which is the name for a part of a roof that pops up above the rest to get some natural light into a building. You see it hit right behind the column on the end of the clearstory. See the gap in the yellow sheathing on the column and the sheathing on the soffit (the horizontal parts of the roof)? The expansion joint is wrapping up around the column and running along the high side of this angled roof.

How can this be? Doesn't the roof structure have to be connected to some beams or something? Well, sure. The roof joists are attached firmly to the beams on the low side of the clearstory. However, because the expansion joint runs along the high side of this clearstory, the joists sit on Teflon pads. One pad is attached to the joist, and the other is attached to the beam holding it up.

The Teflon pads are the thin light-colored wafers between the rusty-looking steel plates. The upside-down U-shaped piece of steel on top allows the joists to sit at an angle.

Here's the thing about expansion joints: pretty much finish needs an expansion joint. The brick face on a building needs an expansion joint at least every 200 feet (if I recall correctly), and even drywall needs very small, pretty expansion joints, called control joints, in wide expanses of walls.

The little lines in that drywall are control joints. Here, they're being used for aesthetics, to separate different colors in this decorative soffit. The control joint is a little piece of V-shaped plastic about 1/4-of-an-inch wide with little flanges that the drywall contractor muds into the drywall on each side of the joint. It allows the drywall to expand and contract so it doesn't crack and look skanky.

Have I expanded your horizons with my expansion joints? Good. Now go have a good weekend.

Random bits and ranting

Lots of tiny bits to say today, but nothing I can make a real post out of. So here goes:

• I think Wanda is on medication. I mean, I know Howie gave her a shape-up-or-ship-out chat, but for someone with rage issues, she's been really calm here lately. I have to wonder about it. I often find that folks with rage issues can only sorta tamp their urges down for a while before they blow up again. However, she's just been...placid. She had a brief but tranquil chat with Sarge this morning, and when she's come to my desk to ask about locating an elevator in the patient tower, she's been polite and amenable to moving it around a bit to help out my space planning. Weird. If/when Jaqueline comes back, I wonder if that'll set her off again.
• The doctors who will own the Mendwell Center for the Reality Impaired (MCRI) have changed the name to the Mendwell Center for the Reality Challenged (MCRC). They've about wrapped up buying a site, but now they need to hire a company to manage the facility and find them staff and a CEO. They had a guy who was gonna do it, but he didn't have any experience starting up a psych hospital.
• In other MCRC news, I asked Howie to pleasepleaseplease put Jimmy Ray on my team for MCRC so that we could smoothly go to Revit, which Alex wants to do. Howie agreed and said that staffing should work out for us to work on this together, which is good. Not so good is that Jimmy Ray's wife has been offered a position with her company in another city--a huge promotion, and if they talk it over and accept it, then Jimmy Ray's gone in three months. And so is all my disco music.
• The main partner over Pomme de Terre promised the owner that all patient rooms would have 4'-0" clear on each side and the end of the bed. This was news to all of us--news we coulda used about two months ago when we were trying to plan out the structure for this building. Here's the thing: the AIA Healthcare Guidelines only require 3'-0" at the foot of the bed. When Leslie tried to explain this to the partner more than once, he shouted, "I don't care! We're giving them 4 feet!" We've become a thorn in the structural engineer's side on PdT because we keep changing the shape of this building because of this partner's whims.
• I've discovered something new about handicapped accessibility that's about to make my head explode. Turns out that ANSI and ADAAG are mostly similar, but in some places one is more stringent than the other. Here's the thing: building codes, such as the Uniform Building Code (UBC) and the International Building Code (IBC) direct you to follow ANSI A117.1. But the law mandates that you follow ADAAG. Hence, you have to follow both. Meanwhile, if your project receives and funding from the federal government to get built, you also have to follow UFAS (I'm blanking on what the letter mean), which can be stricter than both ADAAG and ANSI. Somebody get me some Bailey's.
• I've also discovered that I cannot remember a child's name if the child is under two years old.
• I've also discovered that no day is so bad that it cannot be cured with a big styrofoam cup of sweet tea from Chick-Fil-A.

Meet the critters

I've mentioned my cats before, but I realized this weekend that I've never posted any pix of them. Unlike Miss Kitty over at Educated & Poor, I only have two. (And alas, I have no chickens.) Meet Maddy and Hazel.

Maddy is 13.25 lbs and 9 years old this month. She was the biggest kitten in her litter of five, born at the neighbor's across the street from my mom's farmhouse. She is a treatwhore and a snugglehog and snores when she sleeps in the crook of my arm at night. She also gets in my face when my alarm goes off. However, a few pets on the head resets her snoze button.

Hazel (often known around here as Lulu) only clocks in at 8.6 pounds and will be 9 years old in May. A shy little thing even now, she was born to a mostly-feral mama kitty who rolled up to Mom's farmhouse and made herself at home. At only about 8-12 weeks old, Hazel chased a mouse into a hand dug well on Mom's property and managed to land on a red clay ledge between the well's concrete cistern/shell and the hand-dug wall, where she yowled and languished for a few days. Mom finally figured out where the little shit was, put a can of tuna in a small empty bucket, and wheeled it down to her ledge on a rope. The next morning, she pulled up a bucket with a small, weak, tuna-juice-covered kitten with a big tummy. She's been indoors ever since. However, all the meowing she did during that time broke her meower, and until we moved in with Papa (that's Guy) in 2001, dinnertime sounded like this:

Pixie: Who wants crunchies?

Maddy: [loud and proud] Mrrooowww!

Hazel: [muffled] Eeeooww.

I was going to take more pictures for this post, but it appears that our digital camera has gone to that great Circuit City in the sky, leaving us with a weird purplish test pattern instead of an image when we turn it on. It's 4 years old and needs to be replaced. Guess I'll have to use one of the office's digital cameras when I go up to Yuma next week (which I hate doing because you can never find them). Oh well, more cuteness to come when the Design Associates gossip mill is low again....

Scale Figures Gone Wild 2: Still Too Hot for CDs

I had a great weekend that included a massage, a great haircut, and a little retail therapy (damn, my new Ann Taylor brown knit dress makes me look like Rita Hayworth!). Evidently, I'm not the only one that had a wacky weekend. Look what showed up in my interior elevations when I opened my drawings this morning:

Lookin' mighty comfy there, pal. You do realize that you're in the women's restroom, right? That's why there's a sanitary napkin disposal next to you.

Man, it's sad when people show up at the radiology tech work desk and insist on a copy of their CT films right then and there at knifepoint.

Auugh! Take what you want and get out! Just leave the sports page!

Happy Monday, y'all.