When we see parts of buildings coming apart, we get curious, and that can prompt us to learn how things get put together. Sometimes, it’s obvious how building elements began to deteriorate or started to come undone. Other times, it’s a real head-scratcher.
Damaged brick wall.
This masonry wall is separated from the street by about 5 feet of sidewalk, and another 4 feet of planting strip with some trees. The closest lane on the street is dedicated to parallel parking. This damage is about 6 feet above the sidewalk. I just can’t imagine how this happened. But what it exposes is the stuff we don’t usually see (a cylinder of mortar!) so here is an opportunity for exploration.
Many people never see the entirety of a single brick. We walk by brick walls, but are never prompted to ask what a lone brick looks like without its fellow bricks.
Old brick wall of house.
Or we walk over beautiful brick pavers, which some people have no way of knowing aren’t the same type of brick that is typically used for building walls.
Brick pavers in concrete sidewalk.
Or we spent the first decade of our life playing with the pallet of brick pavers our parents eventually, finally, paved the family home’s outdoor courtyard with. So some people probably imagine that all bricks are solid all the way through. However, today’s facing brick, the brick that is visible on a building, isn’t typically solid all the way through. A “solid” brick by today’s standards can have up to 25 percent of its cross-sectional area cored out or depressed.
Above and below: A facing brick with cores.
There are a few good reasons for voids such as cores, frogs (depressions), or cells. Compared to bricks that are completely solid, bricks with voids use less clay, can be fired in the kiln more evenly and quickly (using less energy), and are lighter-weight (easier to transport and to install). Voids also allow for mortar on more surface area of the brick, which helps all the bricks in the wall mechanically bond together better. In the case of cores and cells, mortar can continue through each brick from the mortar bed below to the mortar bed above, further strengthening the bonds between the individual components of the wall. (That’s what that cylinder of mortar is in the top photo – mortar continuing through cores in bricks from bed to core to bed to core. It is the stuff we are not meant to see – part of the magic of masonry walls.)
I guess one downside of a well-bonded wall such as the one in the top photo is that it’s harder to get a damaged brick (or 4 damaged bricks) out of the wall for replacement. I wonder exactly when this damage happened – before or after final completion – and why it wasn’t repaired.
When specifiers specify bricks, we indicate that bricks to be used in exposed conditions, such as at ends of window sills and ends of wall caps, are to be bricks without voids such as cores, frogs, and cells. Otherwise, voids in bricks are allowed, but the voids will not be visible in completed construction.
Sometimes damage happens, but at other times… well, someone didn’t think this through before ordering materials (photo of site wall cap, below). It’s not only when things fall apart that their insides are exposed. Some things just aren’t planned, detailed, or specified carefully. This isn’t magic revealed, it’s just a mistake that got built. Let’s try to do better.
Old brick site wall.
I’m just a brick lover, not a brick expert. The Brick Industry Association (BIA) has lots of useful information. Here’s the technical article that addresses some of these issues mentioned above.
I recently stayed at a historic hotel a few states away. It’s a very historic hotel – over 130 years old, and a designated historic landmark. The framing of the grand old building is all wood. I don’t know exactly what is under the finished floors in the guest rooms, but I do know that wood framing and wood subfloor are among the components in there.
Our bathroom had large-format natural stone tile – about 12 inches by 24 inches – probably not “period” – and also not very old. Based on a few facts that I know from staying there several times over the last half century, and a long-held interest in the building, my best guess is that the large-format stone tile on our bathroom floor had been installed just over 15 years ago.
The stuff is thick – 3/8-inch to 1/2-inch thick, if the base and wall tile are the same as the floor tile – and it appears to be natural marble.
And it’s cracked, in multiple places. And multiple bathrooms on the same floor also have cracked floor tile.
Cracked large-format marble floor tile, hotel bathroom. Photo by Liz O’Sullivan
The stuff under this tile is probably the reason for the cracking. I’m not exactly sure what’s under there besides the wood framing and the wood subfloor, but one thing I do know for sure is that there is barely a single level or flat hallway floor or guest room floor in the hotel. More importantly, some of the floors feel a bit… flexible.
Levelness isn’t a big issue – tile can be installed on ramps, after all. (Our bathroom floor was a bit like a ramp, by the way, noticeably sloping from the door to the back wall. Ah, the charm of an old hotel.)
But my perception of flatness… that is an issue for the substrate under large-format tile. And the flexing in the floor that I felt when I walked down the hall or across my guest room? That is definitely not good under tile. This flexing is probably at the root of the cracking issue. Deflection is an important thing to address for floors which are to receive tile.
Now, I bet that some measures had been taken with the preparation of the substrates for tile so that they weren’t as flexible or unlevel as they are elsewhere in the building. The tile floors certainly didn’t feel flexible or unflat. But… those tiles cracked, after installation. So my guess is that the measures weren’t quite enough.
Obviously humans have been walking on marble for ages – even on thin marble such as tile. The astonishing roof terraces of the Duomo in Milan, Italy, are paved in marble, and any ambulatory person who can get up there (via elevator or stairs) can walk around the roof terraces, on the marble pavers, and even on the sloped marble roof tiles.
Duomo Roof Terraces, Milan, Italy, September 2019. Photos by Liz O’Sullivan
I don’t know what’s under the Duomo rooftop pavers and tiles. (Wouldn’t that be a fabulous tour – the attic of the Duomo?) But I do know that a different substrate installation than what is existing might have helped prevent the cracking of the hotel bathroom floor tile. And my opinion is that if the existing conditions were such that not enough could have been done to create an appropriate substrate for large-format natural stone tile, perhaps a different finish should have been selected for those hotel bathroom floors.
The construction industry has installation guidelines for so many parts of buildings. Manufacturers of specific products and assemblies have their own published installation instructions, and proper installation is often tied to warranty validity. For example, in many cases, an EPDM roofing installation must be done under certain weather conditions, must use specific products approved but not necessarily made by the EPDM manufacturer, and must be inspected by the EPDM manufacturer’s technical representative in order to get the specified warranty.
Building codes incorporate some standards into their requirements – in order to meet code, certain building products and assemblies must be installed according to certain published standards. For example, some building codes require that suspended acoustical panel (“acoustical tile”) ceilings are installed in accordance with the provisions of ASTM C636, Standard Practice for Installation of Metal Ceiling Suspension Systems for Acoustical Tile and Lay-In Panels.
Other building materials, such as lumber, plywood, brick, glass, and natural stone tile, don’t necessarily come with manufacturers’ installation instructions, and since there are many different ways that these materials are used in construction, building codes don’t necessarily govern their installation, either. But industry organizations have developed guidelines for the installation of these materials and so many more. There are at least two separate industry organizations who have developed some guidelines for the installation of natural stone floor tile. The Natural Stone Institute (formerly the Marble Institute of America) has some important guidelines in its Dimension Stone Design Manual.1 A publication by the Tile Council of North America, the TCNA Handbook for Ceramic, Glass, and Stone Tile Installation2 is referenced by the Dimension Stone Design Manual, and is also a very important stand-alone document. The TCNA Handbook has tile installations called out by alphanumeric designations that many people are familiar with – many tile setting and grout manufacturers refer to specific TCNA installations in their product info, and many specifiers use the TCNA designations in Tile Installation Schedules in the Tiling spec sections. Some architects and interior designers carefully refer to the TCNA Handbook when they’re figuring out the designs of tile installations.
But sometimes design professionals just don’t realize that there are industry-standard ways to install things. And then there’s the special condition of an existing, historic building – historic buildings certainly can be tricky. And sometimes the approach that makes the most sense is to work with what you have, and not do any invasive explorations to verify suitability of substrates for new installations. One problem with a project that involves nothing but updating interior finishes is that sometimes the design team is made up completely of people who are considering nothing but the surfaces, and the person selecting the floor tile may not realize that one floor tile is not necessarily interchangeable with another floor tile. Natural stone isn’t as strong as most ceramic tile. So a proper installation of natural stone floor tile requires a stiffer substrate (a substrate with less deflection) than an installation of ceramic floor tile requires.
Both the TCNA and the Natural Stone Institute address stiffness of subfloor for natural stone tile in their publications. For stone tile on wood subfloor without room for a thick mortar bed, TCNA calls for the joists to be no more than 16 inches on center, supporting the plywood subfloor, over which should be installed a plywood underlayment, then a backer board such as a cementitious backer board, then the stone tile. The Natural Stone Institute and the TCNA both call for stone tile subfloor areas in frame construction to have a deflection not exceeding L/720 of the span. There may be some wiggle room with some of the TCNA guidelines (joist spacing, backer board) when using certain uncoupling mats which have specific manufacturers’ installation instructions for the mat and the tile, but the 2 layers of plywood (subfloor plus underlayment) seem to be the best practice in all natural stone floor tile installations.
I’m not an authority on tile, or on the Milan Duomo – the point I’m trying to make with this blog post is that there are ways to design, detail, and specify, in our construction documents, the proper installation of most building materials, and this is not where a design professional’s creativity should take the lead. This is where the design professional’s technical side needs to be guiding the documentation. There are manufacturer requirements in some cases, building code requirements in some cases, and industry best practices in so many cases, including the case of natural stone tile. The designer should become familiar with these. Not all of this technical stuff can be taken care of with the project specifications – some of it needs to be shown in the drawings. Not all finishes can be applied or installed the same way as other finishes, even in a remodel, even when replacing (what-was-probably-small-ceramic) tile with (large-format-natural-stone) tile. When materials are designed and detailed properly in the drawings and specs to explicitly describe a correct installation, they’ll look as good decades later as they did immediately upon completion. (Maybe they’ll even still look good centuries later.)
Duomo Roof Terraces, Milan, Italy, September 2019. Photo by Liz O’Sullivan
Marble roof paver on the left, marble roof tile on the right, Duomo Roof Terraces, Milan, Italy, September 2019. Photo by Liz O’Sullivan
Notes:
The Natural Stone Institute’s Dimension Stone Design Manual is on their website for free. You access one chapter at a time.
The TCNA Handbook for Ceramic, Glass, and Stone Tile Installation is updated every few years. It’s available for $50 on the TCNA website.
When I was in architecture school, people often talked about “building for 500 years.” The architecture program at my alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, is a classical program, steeped in the traditions of ancient Greece and Rome, so this timeframe is not a surprise. For the past 5 decades, all architecture students at Notre Dame have spent an entire school year in Rome, in the middle of their degree program, studying the city and its buildings. Rome is a fascinating city, with many ancient buildings, or at least parts of many ancient buildings, still intact, and in most cases still in use. Usually the buildings being reused have been adapted to be something other than what they were originally built for. A great example of this is the Theatre of Marcellus, built as an open air theatre similar to the Colosseum in ancient times, but then partly used for parts (stone) for other structures, then turned into a fort, then turned into a palazzo (a private palace), and then later turned into apartments. It continues to be used as apartments, and still includes parts of the ancient building. You can see parts of the building from different eras in the photo below (some ancient, some restoration of the ancient, and some of the newer apartments at the top).
Theatre of Marcellus, Rome, photo by Liz O’Sullivan
It’s mostly just an accident that buildings like this have lasted this long. I’m sure the builders of the original theatre didn’t envision it lasting over two millennia. But they used the construction materials, building methods, and knowledge they had – they didn’t have many choices. If they wanted something to last for more than a year, they pretty much had to build it in such a way that it might last thousands of years.
Here in the New World, up in the mountains in Colorado, we often see old miners’ cabins in various stages of deconstruction, decay, stabilization, or restoration.
Miner’s Cabin, Colorado, photo by Liz O’Sullivan
A silver miner probably built the cabin in the photo above – silver mines operated near this cabin starting in the 1870’s – but the actual age of the cabin is unclear. It’s obviously no longer in use. It long ago outlived its usefulness in this terribly harsh spot over 12,000 feet above sea level, above treeline, directly below several 14,000 foot high mountain peaks, whose flanks still have old abandoned mines all over the place – yet the cabin remains. How long was this cabin supposed to last? We don’t know, but in order to build a habitable shelter that would withstand the fierce winds coming down from the mountain peaks, and the tremendous wintertime snow loads, for as long as the miner’s luck or determination held, the builder had to use materials accessible in this remote area (primarily evergreen trees cut from the forest nearby), and the available knowledge at the time. So it stands today, probably accidentally.
Today in most of the U.S. we have many choices of building materials and methods. Usually, the more durable and resilient materials are more expensive, so building owners who are building to hold for less than a decade are going to choose less-expensive materials so that they end up with buildings that serve them well, with little repair or expensive maintenance, for only as long as they intend to hold them. What happens next to the buildings doesn’t matter much to the first short-term owners. But owners who intend to hold buildings for the foreseeable future (maybe a university, a hospital, a public school, or a government) usually carefully consider and weigh the desired lifespan of the building, desired or budgeted maintenance and repair costs, and construction costs. Almost no one has an unlimited budget for construction costs, but some owners do have enough so that they can build in ways that most owners no longer build. Most people don’t pay for double-wythe clay masonry exterior walls as a general rule for institutional buildings, but at least one university that I know of has made this a standard for their campus in recent decades. Some owners only have enough construction budget to build their exterior walls with studs and OSB sheathing, even if their plan counts on the building’s lasting for more than 25 years. They just have to hope that no catastrophic water damage event occurs. In rising floodwaters, a building with an exterior wall assembly with less-durable or less-resilient materials that get soaked will fare much worse than a building with double-wythe clay masonry exterior walls, and may even have to be demolished well before the end of its originally-planned life.
Some old buildings accidentally ended up being long-lasting; some new buildings accidentally end up being temporary. Older methods of construction are more durable and resilient by default, and are more expensive. Some of our newer methods, which can pencil out to make more financial sense for an owner’s intentions for the building, cannot withstand some disasters, or even minor water damage over a long term, and buildings can end up being a total loss before their planned ends. What a waste, in the big picture.
But some buildings are actually meant to be truly temporary.
When Denver restaurants reopened after closing in the early days of Covid, they were allowed to apply for permits to expand seating into the right-of-way and parking lots. Denver has a sunny, dry climate, and if they can get it, restaurants have outdoor patio or sidewalk tables for diners – used almost all year round, even in winter, even when there is no pandemic, at sunny noontimes. We love to be outdoors. But it can get very, very cold in Denver in the fall, winter and spring. When Covid-19 combined with chilly weather, Denver saw a proliferation of small temporary buildings, set up on sidewalks, parking lots, and even streets near restaurants.
None of these temporary buildings is great. Many are small greenhouses with doors, repurposed to be tiny dining rooms with one table inside, scattered around parking lots or restaurant patios. Some are large event tents, set up on sidewalks or streets, with two ends open, and a mess of hoses, cables, and propane tanks to bring electricity and heat for a dozen tables of mostly-outdoor diners. Some are wood shed-type structures, with individual booths in partitioned areas under the roof, and curtains making up one wall. Denverites have been stepping over power cords on sidewalks and avoiding flapping plastic “walls” for months. The restauranteurs were lucky to get these structures – they quickly became hard to procure.
Last month, I ate inside at a restaurant for the first time in over 13 months, to celebrate my husband’s birthday. Well, we were inside, but technically we weren’t in the restaurant. We were in a very thoughtfully designed and constructed temporary “outdoor private bungalow” located on a before-times parking lot, 2 doors down from the restaurant. Instead of the quick-we-need-something-that-we-can-make-do-with approach that most restaurants seemed to take, this restaurant actually had their outdoor bungalows designed and constructed to fit their specific needs. The structures have no floors, but they have rugs. Ours was big enough for a table for 4, but didn’t feel too big for the 2 of us. Each structure has electric heating, nice lighting, a glass door on a closer, and a slider window next to the door. Interior wiring is concealed and thoughtfully routed, outdoor wiring and lighting were carefully installed. The bottoms of the walls are opaque, possibly fiber cement panels, the top parts of the walls are translucent polycarbonate. The roof, a white corrugated shed roof, drains thoughtfully. There are about 18 of these, most in rows of up to 6, with shared walls, in this parking lot.
Covid-Era Outdoor Dining Bungalows, Denver, photo by Liz O’Sullivan
How did one restaurant have such an ideal designed-to-order solution while others scrambled to make do with flimsy greenhouses or tents? Planning. If I recall correctly, this restaurant appeared to me to be late to the game of outdoor dining shelters – but now I know that was probably because they were planning and constructing, while others were popping ready-made things into place. In late September of 2020, the City of Denver announced that restaurants could apply to continue to operate in the public right-of-way or in parking lots through October 2021. So, that announcement set a lifespan of about a year for a temporary outdoor dining structure, one important known thing in a sea of unknowns. This restaurant has had a large following of loyal patrons for almost 3 decades. They kept up a curbside pickup program during the Covid-shutdown days. It’s located in a neighborhood where many people eat out many nights of the week and walk to their favorite restaurants. Employee turnover is low – servers work at the restaurant for years. So although no one could guarantee anything at any time during the early days of Covid, this restaurant is more stable than many, and was sure to have continued patronage at some minimum level.
The restaurant set some requirements for use of the “private bungalows” – reservations in advance, reservation deposits, fixed price 4-course menu only, and a strict 2-hour maximum use time limit, due to a neighborhood requirement that they close the outdoor dining at 10 pm on weekdays and 11 pm on weekends. This restaurant was able to determine some knowns on their own. But my guess is that the biggest piece of this puzzle had to be the permission to keep the outdoor dining bungalows erected through October 2021 – setting a lifespan. Presumably the restaurant could budget based on these things. (Knowing how much diners would spend, knowing the maximum amount of time they’d stay, knowing how long the private dining bungalows could stay in place.) The structures only have to be weathertight for a year. The windows and doors only have to operate smoothly and look good for a year. The thin solid walls only have to resist weathering and look okay for a year. In these very uncertain times, this restaurant was able to take the knowns set by the City, create some of their own knowns, and work with those to come up with a budget for their temporary structures.
Denver became full of temporary structures due to Covid. We have drive through tents and sheds for Covid testing set up in parking lots. There are hundreds of camping tents and tarps set up on unoccupied properties and the strip between sidewalk and street where increased numbers of people experiencing homelessness are living all over the city. Restaurants have the aforementioned strange little greenhouses for private outdoor dining. Our friends’ backyards began to include makeshift roofless enclosures around firepits for socially-distanced dead-of-winter small gatherings. As these things cropped up, I became interested in temporary structures in a way I never imagined I would. Mostly, I have wondered what will happen to the temporary structures when they are no longer needed, or when they start to fall apart. I’m always going to prefer that cities be filled with resilient long-lasting structures, but temporary buildings might continue to have their places in cities too – and these are better when they’re thoughtfully conceived and executed.
Water lapping at the first step of an entry, Doge’s Palace, Venice. This happens all the time, yet the centuries-old building, made of solid stone masonry, is still standing. Photo by Liz O’Sullivan
Some of the lessons we learn most thoroughly come from mistakes we’ve made, or from finding out the consequences of actions we never considered before acting. For a specifier, these lessons hit hardest any time after bid opening, through the first few years of occupancy. (Anytime after pricing is set, or worse, after the building is built.) Sure, we research the things we specify, during the construction documents phase, but unless we’ve been given specific direction, we do our best, trying to keep in mind a general sense of the owner’s need for durability balanced with budget, and go with industry standards that align with those goals.
Discomfort sets in when we realize we need to research something further during construction, or after occupancy, because of a question from the architect. It means our work wasn’t quite right, or wasn’t written clearly enough. We need to follow through, follow up on the work we did, and make sure it was right, so the architect can defend it, or figure out what needs to change in order to make it right. Knowing exactly where and how something is being installed or used (once we’re in the construction phase) sure can illuminate the picture brightly, and let us know in which areas to focus our research. We often end up digging more deeply, because of the specific, now-more-clearly-defined, and now-critical, situation, and we end up learning stuff we’ll never forget.
In the last week I’ve had some good questions from some architect-clients: two questions about submittals. Nothing was wrong with the specified products, nothing was wrong with the specs, but there were some complicating factors that could have led to incorrect products being installed. These issues didn’t show up until the submittals came in during construction.
The most recent question came from the architect because the substrate indicated on the submittal for a type of coating was incorrectly listed. This raised some flags, so I looked into it deeply and realized that the manufacturer’s submittal sheet includes 2 different types of coatings, with very similar names, for various different types of substrates, on the same data sheet. The info I got from the architect indicated that the submittal didn’t use the full name of the product – just the words that were common to both of the different products on the datasheet! The incorrect product would have ended up on the building, if the contractor supplied the product most appropriate for the incorrectly-listed substrate. Lesson learned – I plan to always specify using the full name of a product to reduce the chances of a mistake such as could have happened on this project. The name of this product came from the owner and I didn’t change the way it was written. It was clear, but it could have been spelled out, to make it even more clear.
Another recent submittal question came about the specified thickness of sheet metal for a parapet coping. When I wrote the spec, I selected the default in the specification software I use. It turns out that the color of sheet metal we need isn’t available as standard in the thickness specified for the coping, although it is available as standard in all the other thicknesses of sheet metal specified for other uses. The architect asked why this sheet metal for coping was thicker. I wasn’t exactly sure… dug deep… and am now pretty sure that if this wide coping on this very visible sloped parapet were to be made of a thinner metal than specified, we’d see waviness, oil canning, sagging ugliness. Phew – a good lesson to learn, and just in time. Again, there was nothing wrong with the spec, but if I hadn’t been able to give the architect a good reason to ensure that the spec was complied with, it would have been much easier for the architect to allow thinner metal for the coping, and then we would have had a problem.
The chill that goes through me when I realize that I can’t answer a question about my work product immediately upon being asked is humbling. But no one, no one, could ever know enough about specs to know it all perfectly and thoroughly before ever starting out on the path of writing specs. And yes, the follow-through takes time. Following up on something that is brought to our attention well after we issued our documents requires shifting gears, jumping back to something we thought we were finished with, but we belatedly realize we weren’t. Specifiers must be lifelong learners, no matter how uncomfortable that is.
Some of the projects I work on experience many design changes between initial concept and completion of construction. On healthy projects, the most dramatic changes that I see occur after the schematic design phase, before the beginning of the construction documents phase. A few of these projects of mine have included “green roofs” (vegetated roofs) at the outset of the project. But those were gone before the construction documents phase started. I’m not sure who’s talking whom down from the roof, but it’s outta there, over and over again. Who brought the idea to the project? Was it just something that added a splash of color to the architect’s renderings? Had the owner always wanted to be able to walk in a garden while simultaneously enjoying a great view from a rooftop? Was everyone on board with a green roof until the contractor’s preliminary pricing came in?
Denver voters just passed the Green Roof Initiative last month, mandating vegetated roofs for certain buildings within the City limits. I wrote a commentary about this for the newsletter of our Denver Chapter of the Construction Specifications Institute. It includes a link to the text of the ordinance, and touches on the specifics of the initiative, some green roof risks for owners, and the loopholes in the ordinance. Here’s part of that:
“Denver voters faced Initiated Ordinance 300, the Denver Green Roof Initiative, in our recent election, and voted it in, by a small margin. What does this mean for building owners, developers, architects, engineers, contractors, roofing distributors and product representatives?” Continue reading…
Green roofs have benefits, mostly for the people who get to look out windows and see plants instead of roofing materials, but they can also mitigate urban heat island impacts, and help to improve the quality of stormwater before it hits municipal systems. Perhaps the most idealistic of the selling points made by the supporters of the Green Roof Initiative is the dream of rooftop urban farming. From the mission of the supporters: “Buildings are permitted to use the rooftop space for urban agriculture. This allows for the building to rent out their rooftop space to urban farmers who can then supply their goods around the city.” However, crops need a roof that meets more than just the minimum mandated by the ordinance. Here’s a basic overview of the 3 main types of green roofs. Some require beefier supporting structure, and more complex irrigation systems, than others.
Most owners who are merely looking to build a commercial building in the Denver area will do the minimum green roof, use a loophole to get out of building a green roof altogether, or build outside the City limits.
As I wrote in my commentary, “Building owners will have costs for their green roofs beyond the design and construction phases. They will have risks that owners without green roofs don’t have. Green roof plantings need to be maintained, cared for, and watered, forever. Insurance riders for green roofs will increase the costs of building insurance, but regular insurance policies usually exclude problems stemming from green roofs, so these will be necessary costs. Problems with the waterproofing components of green roof assemblies, discoverable only after moisture intrusion into buildings, are more difficult to diagnose and repair than problems with non-green-roof assemblies. Moisture intrusion is the most common cause of damage to buildings, and roofs are the parts of buildings that are most prone to moisture intrusion…”
Aesthetically, a green roofscape is a lovely goal for Denver, but building owners should not contribute to this blindly. They need to know what risks they are taking on. Sometimes people start projects without knowing a lot, then learn more as design goes on. (And then the green roofs on my projects aren’t there anymore.) In my work as a construction specifications consultant to architects, I expect to see a little bit more of the same pattern I’ve been seeing for my projects – green roofs that are there at schematic design, and gone before construction. Now you see ’em, now you don’t.
Are you designing for the function and performance of the building, or just doing some exterior decorating?
Funny things can happen early in design on a project, when an architect or interior designer makes color boards for the owner to make selections from, or to present to a municipality, or some other entity with authority, for approval.
It’s natural for interior construction products to be selected on the basis of color and appearance – color may be the driver that leads a designer to select the product, manufacturer, finish, and size. Performance is often not a big factor in the choice of interior finishes. For example, a specific color is desired for a conference room wet bar backsplash, to coordinate with a company’s logo colors. The material could be natural stone or metal or ceramic tile or epoxy paint… and then the perfect color is found in a ceramic tile. So that tile gets specified.
However, the performance and function of exterior materials is much more important than their colors. Appearance is important, of course, but the primary function of the walls and roof of a building is to keep water, snow, hot air, and cold air out of the building. Performance should be a primary factor in the choice of exterior materials. But sometimes the exterior components of a building get selected based nearly solely on color, too. Once in a while, by mistake, early in a project, exterior material design decisions are made without even an understanding of the way these materials will be attached to, or constructed as part of, the building. Thenthey get presented to the owner or authorities having jurisdiction, and it’s not until later that the team realizes the selected exterior materials won’t work.
I know this happens, because as a specifier, I’ve had some interesting experiences writing specifications based on the information I’ve been given by the architect for different exterior construction products, including fiber cement cladding, aluminum composite material panels, and aluminum windows. Sometimes, for these and other building envelope products, I’ve just been given the manufacturer’s name and the color – but not a product name. I’ve worked backwards from the color finish, and have narrowed my options down to the only product by that manufacturer that comes in that finish, and, viola, I have the product. Usually this is fine, but several times, I’ve ended up specifying a product that is nothing like what the architect thought it was. What happened was the architect selected the finish from the manufacturer’s available finishes, but didn’t check to make sure that the selected finish was available on a product that would work for the application. Then the team figured out later, after more detailed drawings had been developed, that that was not at all what was envisioned.
Few people pick a car to buy based solely on the colors available from a particular dealer or maker. Most people pick the general type of car model they want, maybe compare some different makes and models for performance, safety, and price, and then look at available colors last. Most buildings are meant to last longer than most cars – they certainly shouldn’t be designed with color foremost in mind. Performance and function of exterior materials need to be foremost in the mind of the designer of a building. Color selection should come after that.
There was probably little room for design-team-confusion during the design and specification of the board-formed concrete wall in the photo above. However, most of our exterior construction products do not include their own structure, air/vapor/water barrier, and finish, all in one material, the way this concrete wall does. All of these functions need to be considered when selecting exterior materials. If the exterior finish can’t stand up without backup structure or substrate, but you’re just thinking about finish, you’re just decorating.
If you, the architect, are not designing for the function and performance of the building’s exterior materials, who do you think will do that, and when? This design work should be done by someone on the architect’s team, and should be done in conjunction with, if not before, exterior finish material selection.
I should mention that I did not coin the phrase “exterior decorating” myself. It’s a good one that I like to borrow.
The best way to learn how buildings get put together may be to build them, or to watch them be built. But another pretty good way to learn how things go together is to see them falling apart.
You may not ever notice the piece of clay tile that plugs up the bottom of a curved tile at the edge of the roof – but here, in the center of the photo below, it’s sliding out, so you see it, and this may make you curious.
Some people call these eave closure pieces “birdstops.” Some manufacturers provide such accessory pieces in metal. These, on an old house in Denver, are clay to match the roof tiles. Their purpose is to keep out weather, birds, and little four-legged critters.
Falling apart has an upside – we can learn how things are supposed to be put together.
Mid-January is unquestionably wintertime. No matter where we are in the northern hemisphere, the long hours of darkness tell our bodies to slow down and hibernate. The cold weather and the piles of snow here in Denver magnify that desire for dormancy.
We have as little daylight now as we had in early December, but every year, all through that crazy month of December, no matter what our bodies tell us to do, our calendars tell us there’s a holiday lunch for work, holiday parties with friends, a holiday program at the kids’ school, we should bring a holiday dish for our December board meeting… everyone wants to celebrate. There are gifts to send, cards to mail, cookies to bake, and get-togethers with family to travel to.
All of this activity is on top of our already full schedules – work and school and laundry and kids’ basketball practices don’t stop to make room for the holiday season, or for extra sleep during the darkness.
I know our world has been this way for a long time – we cram a lot into December, without taking anything out of our already busy lives to make it all fit neatly. Some of the benefits of the holiday season are lost to exhaustion. We can’t actually get to all the parties without physically wearing ourselves out. If we try to fit everything in, the celebrating becomes more work than fun, which certainly defeats its purpose.
Wouldn’t it be nice if work stopped to make room for this extra activity? I think it used to at least slow down for everyone, long, long ago, at the end of the year. Maybe that’s just me, looking back, through rose-colored glasses, at my family’s life when I was an elementary school student.
At the start of this past holiday season, I heard a young emerging professional, an intern architect, talk about not being a very good project manager. She was actually doing a great job of managing her project – always keeping team members in the loop, always following up on things, asking and answering all the right questions. In my eyes, she was just overwhelmed because she was doing everything – she was her firm’s contact person for the owner, contractor, and consultants, she was doing all the production on the drawings for the project, and she was making design and technical decisions, but she doesn’t yet know a whole lot about how a building gets put together. She didn’t realize that she’s actually really good at project management, but there is other architecture stuff that she’s still learning.
All architects should be lifelong learners, but at her firm, and at many small firms these past couple of decades, emerging professionals get thrust into project management positions before knowing much about how buildings get built and how to draw them so someone can build them. Baptism by fire is one way to learn, but it’s best to just focus onone thing at a timewhile in the fray. Figuring out how to draw construction documents without much input from a supervisor, and being a project manager for the first timeat the same time, while also doing all the production on a project, is cramming too much into the job.Some of the benefits of learning fast by taking on a lot of responsibility early are lost… because there’s no time for some important things to be learned at all. But the project goes on anyway, whether or not the project manager ever learns enough about building technology to draw details that are weatherproof.
I may be looking through rose-colored glasses again, but from the stories I’ve heard about the olden days, it seems to me that architecture firms used to have interns just drawing and learning – working under licensed architects who were also working on the drawings regularly. Those architects who were managing the interns were not managing the project – someone else was managing the project (handling communication with consultants and the owner.) So there are three different jobs – the manager managing the overall project, an architect in charge of the drawings but not doing all the drawings single-handedly, and the interns learning and helping out a licensed architect with the drawings.
I suspect that things changed with the introduction of CAD, when the older architects no longer understood exactly how the interns were producing the drawings. A production team disconnect began at the same time that production could be carried out more quickly on computers. More production work could be done by fewer people, smaller production teams were required, so less-experienced people were being promoted to project manager. This disconnect pattern has been continued, perhaps magnified, with BIM, as more information gets input into the model by less-experienced people. The person reviewing and stamping the drawings may not quite like how they look, but accepts the explanation “That’s how the program generates the drawings.”
I think that in the distant past (before CAD, and before my own internship), intern architects were better prepared before being thrust into project management. They knew more about how a building gets built before they had to go walk the site with the owner as the only representative of their firm, or answer the contractor’s question about something on the drawings on the spot while standing in the trailer, or communicate with the structural engineer about the building department’s latest amendments to the International Building Code. In the quest for staffing efficiency, firms give recent grads more responsibility, and emerging professionals take it, and cram it all into the job, in the quest for experience, more autonomy, and higher pay. At the same time, for new grads overall, the time period between graduation from architecture school and achievement of licensure has lengthened.
During the holiday season every December, we juggle our already-full daily lives, plus the seasonal urge to slow down, plus holiday celebrations and traditions. The price we pay for this juggling is that a few of these balls get dropped every year. But that probably just means losing a bit of sleep, showing up at the meeting late and with baked goods from a store instead of from your own oven, and skipping a few parties.
What price does the architecture profession pay for having its emerging professionals try to learn too much on the job, in too short a time period, with too little guidance? What balls get dropped when we try to cram too much into the internship all at once?
I used to dream about floor plans. I know, I know, this is not an uncommon occurrence for people who grow up to be architects. But what’s odd is that I don’t think much about floor plans anymore – I spend more time wondering about what’s inside the walls that comprise those plans.
I remember being a kid and drawing dream home floor plans. The homes were mansions, of course, with ballrooms, indoor pools, morning rooms, lounges, probably a dozen bedrooms, and… I don’t remember what else. My floor plans were made up of single, thick, dull, pencil lines which divided the rooms from each other, and the interior from the exterior. I was little; I didn’t know what was in the walls.
Even when I was older, in architecture school, and when I was already an architect, the plans – how the spaces work – are what I thought about first. Then I thought about the elevations – how the building looks – and then I developed those plans and elevations in tandem so they’d work together without too much design backtracking. This is pretty typical. I didn’t think much about what was in those walls until after plans and elevations were somewhat far along, and some external force (the schedule, my boss, or a work plan) required that I draw details.
But a funny thing happened on the way to becoming a good spec writer – I became a better architect than I’d been before.
Now when I think about unbuilt buildings, I think about wall and roof assemblies first, before I think much about plans and appearances. I even think about the tricky transitions. (I don’t design in my work anymore, but I have sometimes thought about designing a home addition, and a house in the mountains.) When I see interesting buildings, I wonder about their wall assemblies, and how those influenced the building’s appearance.
The building blocks for real buildings aren’t those single thick lines I scratched out as a kid; they never were. Today’s building blocks are complicated assemblies. Before getting too far along with plans and elevations (the fun stuff), determine all the wall assemblies, roof assemblies, and foundation and slab components (the hard stuff). You can design these assemblies nearly independently of the plans and elevations – so nail them all down early! Then use these assemblies, these building blocks, as you design the plans and elevations.
That way you can work through the tricky details as you further develop your elevations and plans, rather than trying to resolve a terribly messy detail that you are stuck with because you took the aesthetic design too far before doing much technical detailing.
Once in a while, I prepare 100% Construction Documents specifications based on a pretty good drawing progress set that happens to include a couple of excessively unresolved areas, which haven’t changed much between Design Development and 90% Construction Documents. Then, when I review the Bid Set drawings, I find unexpected new things, that are not coordinated with the specs, because a challenging assembly or transition finally got designed as the inevitable deadline approached. This happens even on projects designed in Revit, even on projects with COMcheck requirements, and even on projects which have “wall types” for all assemblies (interior and exterior) figured out, but in plan detail only, from the beginning.
Waiting to resolve tough details can result in uncoordinated documents, or worse, conditions that get resolved awkwardly (and look bad), or need to be drastically changed at the last minute.
Understanding what’s represented by the lines we design with is what separates the grown-up architects from the kids.
Last week I had an experience that makes another good case for the licensure of architects and the regulation of use of the word “architect” and its derivatives.
I was chatting with a parent outside our kids’ after-school activity. She asked what I do for work and I gave my standard brief initial answer, “I’m an architect.”
She immediately told me her story. Her family is building an addition on to the house they recently bought. But they’re months behind with getting going on construction because of the first architect they hired.
After 3 months of working with the first architect, the drawings that they received for bidding to contractors couldn’t be built from – one bidder after another said he couldn’t build from those and needed other drawings. The night before the architect was planning to submit for permit, she checked the code, and found that the addition she’d been designing extended 5 feet into the setback. They’d have to redesign. My acquaintance went back to her with what the contractors said, she replied defensively that she “could do this,” she could submit the drawings and get a permit, this is what she does.
They fired her, and began looking for another architect.
Do the services provided sound like the services of someone who has worked for at least 3 years under the direct supervision of a licensed architect?
Not to me. But imagine the confusion of someone who has never hired an architect before.
Many single-family residential architects and designers draw more-constructible details, and are more familiar with building codes than many commercial architects (who have much more to learn about, and often, much bigger buildings to work on). They learn from working with experienced residential architects or designers, and from time spent on the jobsite. Less documentation is required for residential builders – contractors who do houses are used to building from pretty sparse documents. If they couldn’t build from what my acquaintance had given them, then those documents were pretty bad “construction documents.”
The services provided to my acquaintance sound to me like those of an unlicensed designer who hasn’t done any building envelope work, only interiors, and had no idea that she wasn’t competent enough to design an addition. She probably hadn’t worked under a licensed architect for very long, if at all.
(Only if you’ve worked for at least 3 years under the direct supervision of a licensed architect, and have passed your licensing exams, can you legally call yourself an architect.)
Knowing that my new acquaintance had moved to Colorado recently, I figured she didn’t know that in Colorado, you don’t actually need an architect for single-family residential work. Many Colorado home designers are not architects. Unfortunately, some of them imply to the public and to their clients that they are architects. Many of them did go to architecture school, and have degrees in architecture. However, a degree in architecture means only that you learned a lot of design and theory, and not much of the stuff you need to know in order to get buildings actually built. That’s why you have to work for at least 3 years under the direct supervision of a licensed architect (and pass your exams) before you can go out and offer architectural services to the public on your own. It’s actually possible that the designer my acquaintance hired is an architect, but just a really incompetent one. In my opinion, it’s much more likely that she’s not licensed.
I feel bad about the money and time lost by my acquaintance. But even more than that, I’m embarrassed to be associated with this “architect” in the mind of my new acquaintance, and in the mind of all consumers who have similar experiences. I’m embarrassed for all architects. People who are not competent at architectural services, and who call themselves architects, bring down all architects in the eyes of the public. Incompetent practitioners in all professions create a bad name for those professionals, of course. But in Colorado, we have a lot of people who are not competent at architectural services simply because of the fact that they do not have enough experience working under someone competent to actually take their exams – but they go ahead and call themselves architects anyway.
Why does this matter, beyond my personal embarrassment? I believe that consumers should be protected, and so do the people of Colorado. That’s why the profession of architecture in Colorado is regulated by the Department of Regulatory Agencies. That’s why the Colorado Revised Statutes (our laws) require that a person be licensed to practice architecture in Colorado in order to be able to use the titles “architect,” “architects,” “architecture,” “architectural,” or “licensed architect.” In addition, our laws require that a person be licensed to practice architecture in Colorado in order to use the words “architect,” “architects,” “architecture,” “architectural,” or “licensed architect” in any offer to the public to perform architectural services (this includes marketing materials and websites). (A person who is working under the supervision of an architect and is in the process of completing required practice hours in preparation for the architect licensing examination is explicitly allowed to use the term “architectural intern.”)
Residential designers are perfectly within their legal rights to design houses and additions to houses. Many of them are very good at what they do. But unless they’re licensed architects they’re not allowed to imply to their clients that they are architects. Licensure does not guarantee competence, but it sure can weed out the least competent.
Learning isn’t always comfortable.
Are you designing for the function and performance of the building, or just doing some exterior decorating?
Mid-January is unquestionably wintertime. No matter where we are in the northern hemisphere, the long hours of darkness tell our bodies to slow down and hibernate. The cold weather and the piles of snow here in Denver magnify that desire for dormancy.
Comments From a Spec Writer 