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It’s all about the verbiage

3/31/2014

Since I have worked in North Carolina my entire post-College career, I am not sure how it works in other municipalities. We have a form in our Administrative Code called “The Building Code Summary”, which is really a very useful form. It is several 8 ½ x 11 pages and I have incorporated it on my cover sheet. What this particular form does is spell out all the information about the building and project area so the plans reviewer has some basis to start his review. In the good ole days we would submit a plan and the plans review would have to go through the entire set to understand the mindset of the designer and see what the designer was doing was allowed by code.

A simple example, on the building code summary form list, the occupancy type and construction type are indicated. Presented with that basic information it is easy for the reviewer to know whether the area and height of the building are permitted under the code. He doesn’t have to go looking through the drawings to try to determine what type of construction or even if it is several types of construction. We have been using the building code summary in North Carolina for so long, I really can’t imagine trying to review a set of plans without it. I do not know if other states use such a form. I know Virginia does not, as one of my fellow Hokies is an administrator in the plans, permits and inspection department in Virginia and she had not seen one before I sent her the one from North Carolina.

For those of you unfamiliar with the North Carolina State Building Code, it is the International Building Code with North Carolina amendments. My understanding is we have a more rigid structural section because we have these things called “Hurricanes” over here, something I am sure people in South Dakota have read about. As stated before, the Building Code Summary is in our Administrative Code, so I am not sure if other states have a similar document..

Now strange as it is, the city of Raleigh will not accept the state building code summary form. You must download and use Raleigh’s form or they will not accept your drawings. I find that hard to imagine, so one day I asked the “gate keeper” as they call her, as she is the one who accepts the drawings for submittal, why we can not use the state’s form? She talked to one of the senior plans reviewers, someone who I always had a difficult time communicating with, and she pass down this explanation, “I was told that Raleigh had created the building code summary first and that the state had copied Raleigh’s AND Raleigh thought theirs was better. How do you argue with that.

I do mostly commercial work. Free standing building and upfits. If you have the word “upfit” on your title block, the city of Raleigh will not accept your drawings for review. On the building code summary I typically check one of two boxes on the Raleigh form. These options don’t exist on the state form and they are “shell alteration” or “tenant completion”. Ironically “upfit” is an option on the state form. I understand the concept of what Raleigh is trying to do. They are trying to control what occupancy goes into a spaced that has been issued a Certificate of Occupancy.

The example I typically use is if a small strip center is designed and built and was classified as mercantile, that is what the expected use should be for that building. I have seen several situations where the a couple of bays have been leased out to an emerging church that is looking for a place to call their own. Many times they used rooms in school or municipal gathering spaces and that leaves them at the mercy of the primary use of that space, so they may not be able to get it for their intended schedule. These churches want to rent a small space they have control over. The problem is that a church is an assembly occupancy not a mercantile occupancy, which may cause a situation where an hourly separation is required. If the city issues a CO for the mercantile space then the realtor can then give the key to the potential tenant and then move on. The city want to control this by issuing a “Certificate of Compliance” for the modified shell space and wait until you have a actual tenant to issue the “Certificate of Completion”. So in some cases I have issued the exact sames drawings I did for the “Shell Alteration”, but with a tenant name in the title block so the City can issue a second permit and a CO.

More recently I did the same types of drawings in Durham where I knew of no issues with upfit and shell alterations. To my surprise I was informed by the contractor that we needed to resubmit with tenant names on the drawings. I had to make several trips to the inspection department to finally grasp what I was being told. I was informed that if the drawings had - shell, vanilla box, upfit or something similar that they would only issue a Certificate of Compliance. I asked specifically what if the space was 100% complete and all that was need was for the realtor to hand over the key and the tenant could move in a desk and be ready for business, what then? Again I was told that if it had vanilla box or something similar they could not issue a CO. So regardless of how complete the drawings are, the title determines whether I can get a CO.. I asked do I need to specify a tenant name on the title block and the answer was “No”. So after a brief discussion it was determined that if I put “for occupancy, 100 Main Street, Suite 100, Durham, NC” then I could be issued a CO regardless if there was a tenant or not? I asked so what happens if the CO is issued and a different occupancy moves it? I was told then the new occupant would be noncompliant. So apparently it is all about the verbiage, not about the drawings. I am still trying to absorb this one?

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The design process few understand

3/24/2014

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I recently had a meeting with my weight loss doctor, yes I’m a little short for my weight. We had been discussing the things that could affect your weight loss and besides what you eat, how much you eat, and when you eat, there are other items such as how much you exercise and how much you sleep. I’ve told him in the past that if I didn’t have to sleep I wouldn’t. There are just too many things I would like to do. So the subject of lack of sleep comes up often in our meetings, once every two months. He told me he had a friend who’s son was an architect and about the late hours he had been working. People always look at you when you’re an architect and just assume you work late hours, but never understand why.

I told him how my dad had informed me that he would never take a subjective major only an objective major in college. So I pointed out that a subjective project is never really finished. I asked the doctor when he thought an architectural project was finished and he responded “when it is done?”. I told him I had learned, in about my fourth or fifth year of college, a project is done when you quit working on it. In reality there are really two answers. When you quit working on it or when the deadline hits. I informed him that we are typically task oriented, not time oriented. The doctor said he was time oriented and that there was only so much time allotted per patient and then he had to move on. I told him that when you’re designing and you think you’re finished, you have a tendency to sit back to look at your product and start thinking, “What if”. So you start rethinking about certain details. This goes on until you finally pull the plug on your self. This process happens no matter what creative discipline you are in. If you are a writer and you finish your paper, you go back and read it again always thinking about how to reword something. If you are a photographer how many times to you post process and image until you get just the right picture you wanted?

When we design buildings everything in interactive, so everything we adjust affects something else in the design. As you get your plan laid out to a point where you think everything flows and works well, you get one of those “what if” ideas and change something. If you like the internal change you made then you have to change the exterior to make sure it is coordinated. The exterior change may not be anything major, but as you look at the new elevation and see the configuration and spacing, you get another one of those “what if” thoughts, so you change the windows spacing and then you have to go back and see how it affects the interior. This process goes on and on until finally you stop. Many times we just step away from it to give our poor brains a rest, but eventually you have to let it go. Time may have run out or there is a new project requiring your attention.

When in college we had design labs. Each year the starting time changed, but the format did not. We had three, four-hour labs three times a week. An example is my freshman year, we had design lab Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 8am till noon. You soon learned that you would also be spending Monday through Friday evenings there too! Sometimes Saturdays snuck in and soon Sunday evenings became a regular. People couldn’t understand why we were there all the time. I could only imagine what is was like being able to come back to my dorm room in the evening, do a specific number of math problems, read a certain chapter, and answer some questions then being done for the evening. If all we had to do in architecture was design a square box 3” x 3” x 3” we architecture students could have been done for the night too. When you are given a project, like my first project “Design a beautiful cube” it makes it a whole other story. It is one thing to design something, it is another to try to figure out what you are suppose to design. So that is where the process started. We all designed something within those first four hours of design lab, but our project wasn’t due until 8 AM the next morning. Being more scared than curious, we all showed up that night trying to refine our designs. It started that way and then continued through five years of college. By the time we got to fifth year, we weren’t so scared anymore, but had the desire to make the best project we could. “Think out side the box” they would tell us, so after your initial design you started that “what if”process. Some of those alternate idea would lead you to a dead end. Some of those solutions would lead you to a place that was worse than where you had started. Every now and then you hit a home run. For every problem there are multiple solutions and that is why the design process is ever so long. There is only one solution to 2 + 2 as my father, the engineering graduate, use to point out. Maybe he was right about those objective majors, but for some of us it just wasn’t the way to go.

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Getting that first job (back in 1979)

3/17/2014

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I am not sure what the process is for getting an architectural job out of college is today, but back in 1979 there didn’t seem to be much interest from architectural firms to come recruit us. My dad always told me “I don’t care if you are the next Frank Lloyd Wright, if you want a job when you graduate, you have to be able to do two things, print and draw”. Our engineering friends would always tell us about their on campus interviews. As a matter of fact, they told us very often because I don’t ever remember there being one for architecture students. We did send out resumes, but the return response was always via mail, never a phone call, and if you got a 10% response rate you were lucky. I could handle getting the “Thank you, but…” letters, but I do remember thinking being a bit insulted by one particular response. I got a pre-printed post card with a canned responses signed with the company’s firm name. I expected at least a person’s name to make it more tolerable. I can remember looking at the firm name thinking, really? I think there was one person who told us he had an on campus interview and was going to become a Naval architect. I don’t think they design buildings, but I guess it was a job?

The process that I use to try to get that first job was to take a rolls of drawings and my portfolio and just go door to door asking if they needed anyone. I am pretty sure they all thought that recent graduates couldn’t offer much to the firm and were not interested in your “design” abilities. Very few showed any interest in my drawings and even less in my portfolio. They all took my resume and “put it on file”, but I don’t think I ever got any call backs from that process. It seemed to me that if they needed a draftsman at that time and they thought you could draw they would talk to you about employment on the spot. That is what happen to me. As stated in my last post, I had an “inside” person who got my foot in the door. Once I came in for the interview I had a brief discussion and was hired on the spot. They needed a draftsperson and apparently after talking to me the boss, who was a civil engineer not an architect, thought I could do it.

I had attempted to get a job with an architectural firm in Blacksburg when I was at Virginia Tech, but that never quite worked out. Again because we had moved to Roanoke, Va, which is about a 45 minute drive from Blacksburg, my dad called on the architectural firms in Blacksburg. So I may not have had a definite in with any firms, I did have a familiarity with them. My spring quarter I was told I could have a job with one of the local firms over the summer, but two weeks before the quarter ended I was informed they could not offer me a job. That wasn’t a good situation as most of the job opportunities in a small town had already been taken by other students. It worked out well as I got a job in construction, which I think all architectural student should be required to do before graduating.

So back to my interview for my first job. After a brief discussion I was told I was hired. When I was asked how much I wanted to make and I asked for a $10,000, which according to Google is the equivalent to $36,000 in today’s money. I was told that was to high and given a dollar per /hour number which worked out to about $9,800. The boss got up told me to start the following Monday and then left the room, I guess he thought the meeting was over. I had to ask in a loud voice as he walked down the hall, “What time do you start?” to which he replied “8:30”. Then I said “What do I wear?” to which he responded “What you have on is fine”. I was wearing a three piece suit. So I showed up that next Monday and sit directly behind a guy wearing blue jeans and a rolled up tee shirt. My first thought was “I think I am over dressed!” and I never wore a suit to the office again.

Having no experience in an architectural office I was very apprehensive about what exactly I was suppose to do. Someone finally brought over a set of marked up blueprints and told me to start making the corrections. Fortunately I had enough common sense to looks at the blue prints and think “Surely they can’t want me to erase these prints and make the changes on them?”, but I just didn’t know? So I got up and asked was I missing something and to which they said “Oh yea, the originals are in the file drawer”. My first opportunity to look like a rookie averted. I lasted at that first job about 10 months. I am pretty sure I pissed off one of the principals, because two weeks prior to letting me go due to “lack of work” they had hired two new architects. I may not have been the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I was smart enough to understand that my release had nothing to do with work load. I was a great experience. It was an office of about 12 people and an A/E firm, so I got to draw all disciplines which I think helped me understand the big picture at the beginning of my career.

One memorable moment came from the engineer that was good friends with my dad and had helped me get the interview. He was the only PME engineer in the firm and I was doing some drafting for him. After working on the drawings for about an hour he came over and told me I was doing it wrong. I told him that I was doing what he had asked me to do to which he responded “Don’t do what I say, Do what I think”. I really didn’t have much of a come back for that and I have never forgotten it. As a matter of fact, I have used it several times myself.

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How I got from there to here.

3/10/2014

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I have read many accounts of how other people became architects, but I haven’t read any similar to my situation, so I thought I would share.

Most stories go along the line of - I knew I wanted to be an architect when I was five because I love to play with my lincoln logs or I was always drawing. When I was young I wanted to be an astronaut. I remember drawing a picture of a spaceship, not extraterrestrial, but something that looked like it was from NASA and that was in elementary school. I pretty much don’t remember having any other definitive plans until my senior year in high school.

As a junior in high school, I along with several of my friends took technically drafting 1 (TDR 1). Drawing exploded bolts and gears, something I found extremely boring. Once you passed TDR 1, then you could either take TDR2 or architectural drafting. All but one of my friends chose architectural drafting. The lone crazy one who took TDR 2 ended up being my roommate for my first 3 years at Virginia Tech and who was also admitted into the school of architecture. Our one project for the entire year in architectural drafting was to design your dream house. Apparently somewhere along the way I thought this could be a fun profession. I got a whopping 1000 on my SATs and had a 2.8 GPA (that was till out of 4), so as you can see I was no Einstein. Living in Roanoke, Va the logical college to go to was Virginia Tech and my father was an alumni. I don’t know if it ever occurred to me that not all colleges offered all degrees, but I knew Tech did offer an architectural degree. Although I can’t prove it, I think I applied to Tech in mathematics and I later called up admissions and asked to change my major to architecture and was told no problem. I can guarantee you that would not be possible today. there was no portfolio required and I did not have to go through any interview process. I got accepted and took a summer orientation trip up to Tech to visit my home for the next 5 years - Cowgill Hall.

The main administrative building on campus, Burruss Hall, sits on the edge on the drill field. Virginia Tech had been a military based college and still has an active corp of cadets. The entire campus is organized around the drill field. So during my summer orientation I go into the administration office and asked where the architecture building is? I was informed directly behind Burruss Hall. So I look at the map and see “Cowgill Hall”, to which I responded “Cow-Gill, that is a funny name for a building?”. The nice lady responded “Mr. Cowgill didn’t think so!” Cowgill is pronounced (Co-gull).

The first design lab, first year, first day started at 8 AM Monday morning. Freshmen design labs were 8 - 12, M/W/F each quarter. Yes, I am old enough to have gone to college on a quarter system, not a semester system. The professor walks in and says “I want you to design a beautiful cube and bring it back at 8 O’clock tonight”, then walks out. Now I went to design buildings, so you can imagine what I thought! It was about the same for everyone else in my class, WTF? Needless to say that was not a successful project. I had determined before I ever got to Tech I was going to graduate with an architectural degree no matter how long it took, there were no second options. To this day I am still the only person I know who got a D in architecture. I am neither proud nor embarrassed about it. My dad told me he would never take a major that was subjective such as music, english or architecture. He would only take a major that was objective like math and engineering because no matter how much the professor hates you “ 2 + 2 always equals 4”. So my D only meant that my professor and I were not on the same page! My dad never asked about my grades, to him it was very important to have a degree, any degree, so the only thing he would ask at the end of each quarter - “Are they going to let you go back?”

We started over 400 in my freshman class and graduated about 125. Third year was the weaning out year. They typically would bring you in and tell you they had some “concerns” about you and architecture and they would like to help you if you decide to move in a different direction (aka “get out of architecture”). My meeting was short. My professor was Donald R Sunshine. Yes all you Cowgillites will remember the name! Professor Sunshine told me as I entered his office “Tim, we have been having some thoughts about you and architecture” to which I immediately responded “So have I and I am staying!”. Professor Sunshine responded with “Well I guess there isn’t any more to discuss.”, so I turn around and left. Professor Sunshine was also one of the faculty my fifth year advisor ask to sit in on my final presentation. When I finished and my advisor asked if there were any final comments, Sunshine said “I hope you don’t put this crap out in the real world when after you graduate.” to which I responded “No, Sir I will not put the crap out after I graduate!” I would love to see Professor Sunshine now and tell him I managed to stay in the architectural profession for 33 years since graduating and self employed for 26 of those years.

I never planned to open my own office. I don’t remember having a burning desire to do such. The last year of the last firm I worked at things were in transition. The principals were changing and it really wasn’t a fun place to work anymore. There were four of us who decided we were going to leave at some point during the year. Two left on their own in early 1987. I was asked to come into a conference room after lunch where I was told I was going to be let go. I liked my bosses and I still do, but I did not like what the firm had become. I told them no problem, that they had done me a bigger favor than they realized. I was also informed that another person had been let go before lunch, but I had gotten out to quick for them to talk to me. I guess that was suppose to make me feel better? When the four of us had talked about leaving and were discussing what we were going to do, two of us had the opinion that we could do everything that was being done in the office ourselves. The only thing that we were missing was clients! You will read many articles about “the business” of architecture. You have to be decent in both architectural skills and business skills if you want to succeed at self employment. I learned the business part the hard way - trial by fire, but I survived. It was self confidence that lead me down the road to self employment, never a vision I had.

I graduated in June of 1979 and had a job in Chapel Hill, NC within 4 - 6 weeks. Sometime it isn’t what you know, it’s who you know. My dad graduated in mechanical engineering, but was a lighting rep by profession. We had lived in Greensboro, NC for five years and dad called on A/E firms over the entire state. He had become very good friends with an engineer who was working at a firm in Chapel Hill, so that was my foot in the door. I worked there for less than a year, then moved on to a firm in Durham, NC for the next two and a half years and to my third and last firm before I went on my own. The firm sizes were always small. They ranged from six people to fifteen people. I never wanted to work for a large firm because I always thought working for a small firm would give me more exposure in a variety of areas rather than get pigeon holed doing one task.. I have no complaints about that decision. So I graduated at 23 and started my own firm at 31. I did my three years internship, we had no IDP back then. It did take me three tries to pass the exam. I always passed some parts of it, but the last part for me was the 12 hour design test. I may do another post about that wonderful and dysfunctional experience! It wasn’t until I finally passed it did I get shivers and a brief fear thinking “I could have never passed this test”. It all gets back to that subjective thing. I left the first try thinking, I wonder if I passed? On the second trying I thought, Well I think I did my 50%, lets hope the graders do theirs. One the third test I thought, I know I did my 50%, I hope the graders were in a damn good mood when they reviewed my test!. I knew of some failing designs that passed and some passing designs that failed, I was hoping the architectural gods were smiling on me that third time. Remember we could only take the test once a year back then!

So there was no path for me to follow and no shining light to see. I can’t tell you why I became an architect and I am not sure I will ever fully understand it myself, but once I got into architecture there was no looking back. I think I could have excelled at computer science and I think I would have been a damn good attorney, so I had options. Life is a journey and mine has been great! I get a tinge of fear if I think about “What would I do if I couldn’t practice architecture anymore?”. I am adaptable enough I would find something else, but it is not something I look forward too and fortunately it is not something we architects ever have to stop doing!

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Google this "no internet"

3/3/2014

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We have come a long way. Last week when I lost my internet, I really hadn’t realized how dependent I had become on the internet. I longed for the day when the internet was available 24/7 and it has arrived. I remember telling my boys I couldn’t wait for the internet to be available anytime and anywhere. I always envisioned towers being built all over the place, so I could pull my laptop out anytime and getting on line. One day it hit me that the time had arrived, but I wasn’t sure how it snuck up on me. When I thought about it, I realized what had happened, while I was looking for the PC / laptop computers to advance technology, it was the mobile market that crept in. Our cell phones are no longer phones we talk on that can also do some limited tasks, they are now miniature computers that we talk on instead.

I am sure anyone my age, 57, would recognize the sound of a blazing 300 baud modem connecting. It is a distinctive sound that isn’t easily forgotten. It is hard for me to remember exactly how I dealt with my dial up modem. When did I check my email? Now I just check it anytime I want. At work we could get online to send files and check emails, but back then emails were something in addition to our snail mail and faxes. Oh yes, faxes were the big thing and to be quite honest I still consider my fax machine to be very important to my business.

So on a recent Sunday night my internet was moving a bit slow. My routine is to unplug the modem from Time Warner Cable and unplug my netgear router. I typically plug the modem in first and let all the light come on then plug in the router. This always seems to make my computer run faster. Trouble is when I put the plug the modem back up, I got zilch! No lights whatsoever, which I knew was a very bad sign. So knowing I couldn’t get on the internet, I would just get back to AutoCAD and get some drawing done. I had forgotten how much the internet has become an integral part of my life, as I was working on my project I needed to determine what sizes were available for walk-in-coolers and without thinking I immediately switched to my browser to google “walk in cooler”, only to be quickly reminded that I had no access. We use to rely on Sweets Catalogs for such information, but I can not tell you how long it has been since I have had a set of Sweet’s in my office. I have been a Google users for a long time and it occurred to me just how dependent I had become. No gmail, no Google calendar, no Google voice, no Google keep, no Google chrome, and no Google drive pretty much has me grinding to a halt. I do use Libre Office sometime for letter writing, but I am leaning more towards Google drive (which use to be known as Google Docs).

Obviously the nicest thing about using all these internet services is that I have access at multiple computers, as long as I have the internet. Since we can buy hot spots or use your phone from your cellular provider, if you have to have internet you can pretty much have it anytime you want,as long as you are willing to pay for it.

I am still waiting on fast file transfers. I use dropbox, but it takes time to the files to sync. You could use remote access software such as teamviewer or logmein. I believe these have free versions, but one of the limits of free is no file transfers. To get around this just use the software to remotely send a file from the computer you are accessing to dropbox and then you can use your local computer to download it where you are. Again, this takes time.

So it occurred to me that the internet really makes my life better and easier, but when you have all your eggs in one basket it is never a good thing. I do have a 128 GB jump drive I carry on my key chain. At least once a week I sync my drawing files from my work hard drive to my jump drive, so I always have my CAD files with me. I also use carbonite for cloud backup and run a local backup program that backs up my files to a 1 TB USB external hard drive. I have CAD on a laptop at home, so I can draw from there if I needed. Let me warn you, if you have an older Laptop, as I use an IBM T60, if you plug in a 128 GB jump drive it feels like it sits there for days accessing the files. I came to the conclusion that the laptop is too slow and the drive is too big just to try to draw on one project. What you need to do is to take a smaller jump drive and just put the drawing files you want to work on in it, otherwise you might go watch a movie while computer tries to read all the files on your 128 GB hard drive.

So yes there are workarounds if you don’t have access to the internet, but you must plan ahead. We are expecting some freezing rain in Central Carolina today, so I will prepare to work from home this afternoon. I do make backup plans, but boy it sure is nice to be online 24/7!

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It’s all about the verbiage

The design process few understand

Getting that first job (back in 1979)

How I got from there to here.

Google this "no internet"

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