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

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

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

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

Better but busy

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

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

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

Wow, tomorrow? Thanks for the warning.

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

...but sick is a four letter word.

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

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

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

Awesome is (not) a four letter word

I returned to work the day after New Year's Day to immediately have to go to a client meeting to review interior design concepts and have a user group meeting. We needed to show the clients what kind of finishes and colors we'd be using, and I needed to show the actual users of the space what kind of cabinets and rooms they were getting and where do you want the head of the patient in this operating room and is it better for you if the crash cart on this side or that side of the nurse station?  I generally don't mind these meetings--I even find them invigorating at times--but this time, I just wasn't feeling it.

After spending nine or so days away from architecture, I realize how much I didn't feel like being an architect.  Not that I suddenly decided that I now want to do something else for a living, it's just that I was tired of buildings and flooring choices and equipment locations.  See, if you're a dentist, you aren't forced to constantly look at teeth all day as you walk and drive and go to the bank.  People don't walk around with their mouths wide open so you can see their molars and hey, that might be a cavity right there! If you're an elementary school teacher, you don't have to teach everyone you meet in the grocery store and at the dry cleaners and the vet's office how to do long division and where Italy is on a map. But as an architect, I'm constantly, constantly confronted with the thing I do for a living all day: buildings.  I see them everywhere I go, I interact with them, and I compulsively analyze them. And what I have in common with doctors and dentists (but not with teachers) is that if anyone finds out at a party what I do for a living, they want me to analyze yet something else and give them free professional advice.  And to that, I say fuck you.

After throwing myself into my work for all of 2012, I'm pretty sick of being super awesome architect girl all day. i need a break from all this archicrap in 2013, and I needed the break in an untimely fashion on January 2nd during my user group meeting.  As I sat down to talk with  the head of patient care and the OB surgeon, I just thought, "Well, fuck it. Just be nice and get this over with."

And it went strangely well. I asked questions, we talked, I made some joke about how designing a hospital is like taking a ring into Mordor and made everyone laugh, and three hours later, we had a lot of good information to keep moving. Even Howie complimented me on how well I did in the meeting.  I didn't think I did anything exceptional or worth commending, but a pat on the back is a pat on the back.  I'm beginning to think that I've set my threshold/bar for awesomeness a little too high.  Maybe my 85% or 90% is good enough most of the time.  Maybe.

Attempting to slow down

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

No, not worn out, exhausted.

No, not exhausted, depleted.

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

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

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

While looking back through old posts...

...I found this hilarious exchange between Guy and me about religion and Dungeons and Dragons. It actually made me laugh, even now.

Architects: the swingers of the business world

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

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

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