COOKBOOK ARCHITECTURE

The prospect of working for a large architectural and engineering firm focused exclusively on manufacturing facilities was intriguing to Trevor. Aside from the change of environment from his previous employment at smaller firms limited to architectural and interior design, he was attracted by undertaking projects whose sizes were set in 100,000's of square feet, sites were over ten acres, and construction budgets exceeded $10 million. At his interview with the Director of Architectural Design, there were five other factors that sealed the deal for Trevor:

• Extended Useful Life: The facilities were expected to be occupied by the client for at least twenty years. There was a high interest in durable, flexible and low maintenance construction. This was not the planning horizon his past projects had toward specifying less robust materials to look good until the date when depreciation tax schedules dictated financial prudence to “flip” these buildings to new owners.
• Scale to be Creative: The expenditures involved drove owner expectations that the facilities both function well and look great, have an architectural flare. The size of these facilities often required a large production support staff in office spaces that exceed 40,000 square feet, offering opportunities to fashion great working environments.
• Planning Emphasis: The above factors resulted in a longer and better considered planning process followed by a lengthy approvals process for land development during which to produce the building drawings. This would be much different than the nearly impossibly tight time frames that were required to be proposed in order to win projects for commercial and multi-residential clients.
• Sustainability Emphasis: Many of these industrial companies had to comply with shareholder mandates to have facilities that were green in their construction and operations. Aside from being climate-impact-conscious, the owners were also had a vital financial interested in reducing power, water and waste requirements given the scale of the operations. For Trevor, this was a key selling point.
• Ongoing Opportunity: These facilities, once completed, could be expected to be retrofitted every few years as new products were brought into production. Such a long term relationship with a building and a company offered a chance to be involved in continued process improvement. This promised to be much more fulfilling than ending project involvement at occupancy, or even upon receipt of building permits.

The first year at the new job was largely filled with plant renovations and small building additions. Trevor found the work fascinating in both its scale and having to become knowledgeable how products were assembled in order to fully understand how to accommodate the manufacturing process. Integrating his designs with a myriad of utilities and special gases along with a variety of temperature, humidity and cleanliness requirements presented invigorating puzzles to solve. Keeping the buildings in production during renovations was an added hurdle. Facilities for the food industry were especially challenging, often requiring baking and freezing facilities, and heavy washdown requirements entailing large amounts of water, acid-resistant materials and best production quality control practices. Midway through his second year, Trevor was finally given the assignment to work on those new facilities that were described in that employment interview.

He never made it to the ceremony where he would be awarded a five year service pin. By then he had left the company. When asked why, he could never say that he had not been given the design opportunities that were promised; his assignments had become ever more complex and stimulating. His pay was good and profit-sharing bonuses were generous. While he did have some disappointment with company personnel policies and with a few of the managers and his colleagues, his main dissatisfaction was with what he characterized as a “cookbook approach” to architectural design. Instead of being called to cleverly design a building to envelope its internal processes, his creativity was restricted:

• Function Follows Form: Based on site restrictions and the challenge to park as many trailers and cars as needed while conforming to zoning open space requirements, the actual land available for the building and its siting was limited. Within the available footprint, the building layout could then be selected from just two options: Linear, with Receiving docks on one end and Shipping on the other end; or U-shaped, with Receiving and Shipping docks on the same side. From there, the process flow was contorted to fit into the building, as if this was a renovation or spec building rather than a build-to-suit.
• Function Follows Short-Term Economics: A basic rectangular form with all the same structural bay widths was the norm. Functions that required larger bay widths or higher roof structure clearance were handled as “bump outs,” smaller buildings connected to the large rectangle. The most prominent bump out was the office building, located to minimize walking distance from car parking lots and to maximize distance from the sounds (and smells) of the production areas and the diesel trucks at the docks. This approach tended to lengthen the production line, both physically and as measured by throughput time. While the cost of the production equipment often exceeded the cost of the building, this attempt to reduce building costs could increase the required investment in the production equipment along with the efficiency. This cost tradeoff was rarely modeled in making design decisions.
• Limiting Façade Options: The exterior walls were almost always panelized, whether metal, concrete precast or concrete tilt-up. Patterns and striping that had been used on past projects were recombined for the next facility. The office building extension might be brick or stone veneer to contrast with the production building backdrop. Although a custom “stick-built” building, exterior design development often appeared as something selected from a pre-engineered building manufacturer’s catalogue. This approach was oblivious to the building place. Why shouldn’t the plant in Arizona look just like the plant in Wisconsin? Reusing these limited options certainly saved on design cost. Although the design cost is about 3% of the total building cost, trying to lower that cost was frequently more important than the additional design cost required to identify a strategy to lower the price tag of the building, the 97% of the cost.
• Standardized Details: Reusing past design concepts, both interior and exterior, allowed access to a library of details, immediately retrievable through the computer-aided-drafting-and-design (CADD) system. What was sometimes missed was slight customization of details required for the building now being designed, or the customization of a detail borrowed from another building design that did not apply to this new design. Maintaining a library of standard details is hard (and unbillable) work; assuring that designers use standard details rather than past project details is difficult to enforce. 
• Commitment to Sustainable Design: These requirements were treated as an annoyance rather than an opportunity. The client companies typically achieved this goal by obtaining the lowest available LEED certification. The design firm had developed standard approaches to plucking points from the LEED checklist to meet that goal, and had standard models, strategy narratives and product sheets to quickly compile a submittal that experience almost guaranteed would result in a LEED plaque award. This regimented approach further limited creativity: any new materials or design approaches would require recalculation of LEED conformance, rewriting the submittals and an increased risk that the submission would not achieve the required points from the third party evaluators.
• Building Size, Design Period Length, Budget Size: Most surprising was that working at this scale did not ease many of the frustrations of developing smaller projects. Trying to fit the functions into the building inevitably led to negotiations with site engineers on whether the building‘s width might be expanded by a foot or two from the 450+ feet indicated on the site plan. Providing the required access clearances around equipment within the prescribed column layout resulted in other compromises. The design period seemed comfortably long until the schedule crisis on another project required a temporary shift of manpower until this project was now in crisis. Often, final checking was done during the bid period rather than just before it. A 2% overrun of a $20 million budget was just as unacceptable and hard to narrow as with a $1 million budget.

Trevor’s first sharing of this list of concerns with his manager yielded a concession: He would be permitted to do one new material for every building. Perhaps a sandwich precast panel, or a cementitious panel or a metal roof over the office bump out. In return, he would need to create standardized details incorporating each new material, and add these details to the library.

The conclusion from this work experience was that large building design had different pitfalls than smaller projects, but was no more rewarding due to its scale. Trevor’s new job search required several months. He was finally able to find a position with an architectural firm that had a demonstrated strong commitment to sustainability and place-sourced design through regenerative practices, that went beyond LEED certifications and perfunctory efforts to please the client’s shareholders. Trevor still had to deal with unreasonable budgets, nearly impossible time frames, and management practices that were more focused on lowering costs in order to lower fees, than increasing value that would allow increasing fees. Yet, his new firm’s mission seemed more about architectural design than, well, manufacturing a product.