Adventures in Architecting

The architectural firm where I work specializes in designing schools. After a few years there, I was assigned to a particularly amazing project. A school was going to be receiving multiple large additions, as well as extensive renovations to the existing building. I mean as in “let’s convert the existing gymnasium into an interior swimming pool” level renovations.

I was the lead architect, and the project was being run by another architect who was the project manager. He oversaw me and the rest of the team of engineers, interior designers, and landscape architects. It really was a massive project.

I sat next to the project manager, and you can imagine my shock when I came in one Monday morning and his desk was stripped bare; nothing was left. He had quit with no advance warning and came in over the weekend to take all his belongings. I knew it was a surprise to us, but I was further stunned when his wife called to speak to him the following week. He hadn’t told her he quit either. She. Was. Pissed.

One of the partners of the firm asked me if I’d ever heard of a battlefield promotion and put me in charge of the project. Not long after, that same partner said we could throw away everything we’d drawn to date; this was going to be our first project using CAD (computer-aided design) and we’d need to start everything over from scratch. It felt overwhelming. And thrilling and exciting and wonderful.

We met with school administrators to get the basics of what they wanted and started designing. Then we met with all of the teachers, department by department, over the course of 2 days to get their input on the initial layouts.

One woman we met with was a one-person department. She ran the Home and Careers program, mostly cooking and sewing. She liked the proposed layout of her space, but didn’t like where it was located in the school. It was on the second floor, and she wanted something on the first floor, closer to an entry, to minimize the travel distance from the teachers’ parking lot since she was often carrying in groceries or supplies that were sometimes heavy or required multiple trips. We mentioned her concerns to the administrative team, but they specifically wanted her in a remote, upper portion of the building because her room had been the source of several fire and/or smoke producing events in the past, and they didn’t want us to tell her that was the reason behind her room’s placement.

This wasn’t the only time I got to play “I know something you don’t know.” I worked with another school district that was renovating one of its libraries. After our first meeting with the librarian, she stepped out of the conference room and the superintendent looked at me and said, “You don’t have to listen to anything she suggests. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s going to be fired at the end of this year.” Oh. That won’t make future meetings with her awkward at all.

Another time, at yet another district, the administrators told us they wanted to gut and redo four classrooms to move a different curriculum there. We were asked to go to those rooms immediately, to gather all the information on the existing conditions so we could start designing. And then the kicker. We weren’t to tell the teachers currently occupying those rooms what was happening because they hadn’t been informed yet and they weren’t going to be happy about moving. Usually, when we start renovations we walk through the involved spaces with copies of floor plans, make sure they look correct and show everything, note what the floor material is, what the ceiling is and how high, take lots of pictures, and measure everything. We used a laser measurer. You hold the device up against a wall, point it at what you want to measure to, usually the opposite wall, push a button and get an instant readout of the dimension. It made quick work of what used to be a hassle with a tape measurer. I knew the teachers were in the rooms. What possible reason could I give them for all this activity when they asked what we were doing? The situation was made even worse because one of the classes my colleague and I disrupted was teaching students how to use rulers and we breezed through shooting lasers and calling out dimensions in no time. Those kids didn’t want rulers anymore, they wanted lasers!

Anyway, a few weeks after our initial design meetings, we went back to show everyone the updated drawings based on their feedback. I was bracing for a difficult discussion with the Home and Careers teacher since her room was still on the second floor, but she was delighted. “I see you couldn’t move my room, but you’ve done the next best thing and given me a dedicated parking spot right by the front entry! Perfect!”

I was confused because I knew we’d done no such thing. I looked at the plan to see what the source of her confusion could possibly be. She was seeing a handicapped parking spot, annotated with an HC, and thought that stood for Home and Careers. Awkward!

Spoiler alert – despite it being my first time leading a project, it went well and looked great. The main issue we had was a perfectly lovely yellow ceramic tile on some walls that the superintendent’s wife declared looked like “calf shit” and we had to try again in a different color. I remember attending the board meeting to explain the situation and seeing students in the audience, I scrambled to clean that up to “bovine excrement.” There was also a scare during the demolition phase when several coworkers called me first thing in the morning saying the news was reporting the school had partially burned to the ground. Um, what? Turned out someone had spotted smoke. Some welding from the day before had left something smoldering a bit. The fire department had been called and a reporter heard it over the police scanner and went to investigate. He saw a huge portion of the building was gone, and instead of realizing it had been purposely demolished and was about to be rebuilt in a new configuration, thought it had burned down and raced back to his station to report it. At least that fire wasn’t due to Home and Careers.