Silver Spring Library – You think it’s easy?
I wish I’d saved the photos from the June 20, 2015 opening.
Standing outside at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, I was watching the hoard waiting to enter while the speeches continued. Ike Leggett, David Dise, Parker Hamilton, all the officials and staff who’d worked on the project. County Council members, you name it, were presently taking credit for doing not much more than being in office at the time. The entire area of the future Purple Line station under the library was wall to wall people and spilling onto the sidewalks. They’d hung a large ‘Library Opened!’ banner on the third floor window washers’ balcony you could see from a block away.
Eight years from start to finish.
We’d made it through what had to be one of the worst construction projects I’d ever been through. At one point in the thick of it, I’d told Susanne Churchill, the County’s lead architect, that if she quit, she had to take me with her. At times it seemed we two were alone in caring how it turned out.
In the previous blogs, I failed to mention Robin roped in a local group, Design Army, to help us with the graphics whose work shows up in the photos. Check out their landing page. Getting the County to work with a commercial branding firm? All I can say is that was what Robin could do.
I also failed to thank Sandra Ragen, Studio of Sandra Ragan, who had patiently worked with County staff—and Robin—to make the interiors places people wanted to spend time in. See the photos and decide.
A few unfinished items–like the glass canopy wrapping the exterior of the pavilion, the glass ceiling in the pavilion vestibule–the coffee shop itself–places where the painters hadn’t finished, but the books were in place as was the furniture. It had been a rush to get the occupancy permit–the fire sprinkler tests, the alarm tests, the smoke evac system, finally all had passed, the ADA inspections, the outstanding structural test reports, the book sorting system, the State elevator and escalator inspections, everything had taken to the last minute. A temporary plywood sheet covered the smashed glass balcony railing…
As Mel Straus kept telling me, “You think it’s easy?”
People were queued in front of the elevators to ascend and there was a solid mass moving slowly up the main stairs like they were going to a football game. In fact, they were going to their new library. Who knew libraries were so popular? All of Parker Hamilton’s questions whether patrons could be attracted had been answered in the affirmative.
The construction had taken close to two years. It had been a slog from the beginning with the holes cored down to bedrock to receive the concrete caissons.
I’d inherited the construction administration phase–it was to have been Robin’s project to see through, but the Montgomery County Public School officials (clients who’d always been good to the firm from our start) wanted her to manage a new elementary school–it was our project for the asking, provided Robin led it.
So we lined up Bill Robson as a staff extender to take her place in the field. I was PM, so I would still attend client meetings, and Brian Essig, as project architect, would handle shop drawings and RFIs. Bill was an independent architect with an expertise in construction who we’d teamed with previously. (I mentioned Bill’s winery, Hammerstone Cellars in a previous newsletter.) As it turned out, he landed a developer’s project shortly after the library construction began, and increasingly found himself torn with not enough time to manage the library work. I became last man standing.
Costello Construction was the project’s general contractor. Our firm had done previous projects together, though I’d not been involved. The last was the Silver Spring Civic Center, two blocks west on Fenton Street, whose design architects were Machado Silvetti. Being Boston-based, Machado Silvetti struggled to oversee the project construction, and our firm was asked to get involved. My partner, Nick Germano, took on the assignment, seeing it to completion. He liked to tell of how he’d kept David Costello in line, one Italian to another. I asked whether he’d take on the Silver Spring Library project, but Nick said ‘once was enough.’ It was for me as well.
My career’s biggest takeaway: having a dog fight over who gets the bone is uncivilized–actually dogs do it with less blood shed–and public architecture should be better done than that—my last plea to the universe.
Would a crazy man do such a thing as hang steel from the roof? With the gray fingers like roots searching for bedrock?
Image from the Lukmire Partnership, ca 2015
RFIs
RFIs (requests for information) in the construction industry is a formal communication for exchanging information; it’s mainly a one-way flow from contractor to the AE (architect / engineer) team. Some in the architectural profession view RFIs as little more than a contractor’s hunt for change orders. In some cases, that’s true, but here’s why RFIs are important: they become part of the project record.
Toward this end, I developed a tracking spreadsheet, including an ‘architects’ action’ field, using one of eight possible responses: Confirms Contract Documents; Clarifies Contract Documents; Changes Contract Document; does not change time and/or scope: Changes Contract Document; may change time and/or scope; Allows for Contractor's requested change; does not affect time or scope; Does not allow Contractor’s requested change; RFI returned for insufficient information; RFI returned as inappropriate. The last was meant to say WTF?
The spreadsheet contained a summary log, counting the number of RFIs by each ‘action’ category. Belligerent contractors love complaining about ‘all the RFIs we have to send–see how bad the contract documents are.’ And the log was how I refuted bogus claims. Mind, if your contract documents are truly at fault, it shows–in the case of the library, ours were good.
Tracking RFI’s is tedious work and architects hate it; others consider it survival of the fittest.
The other primary conduit is the shop drawing process, by which the subcontractors submit their proposed products and the AE team reviews for compliance with the construction documents. Some are product data sheets and others are engineered drawings, stamped and sealed by contractor’s engineering consultants. It became quickly obvious that the number of requests for substitutions was going to keep us busy.
Public projects, unlike private developer work, are low-bid, meaning bottom dollar is bottom line. Politicians and public officials always feel it’s necessary to assure their voters no more money was spent than essential. And the private contractors are challenged to save pennies and make a profit–always to make a profit. The best way to profitable work is to drive the price down–and not to make mistakes. It becomes a game that architects either learn to play well, or lose their clients. Writing contract specifications that provide a minimum of three presumably equal value products may not be the most glamorous part of the practice, but done sloppily can leads to misery for the spec writer.
In the case of the unitized curtainwall (recalling last week’s blog), we had written a tightly defined spec. for the three products that we had prequalified with no alternatives allowed. Costello however wanted us to accept a product from a little-known manufacturer out of Florida. We agreed to examine their qualifications, but could never confirm the manufacturer was equal to what we had specified. Worse, their shop drawings were, to be polite, incompetently done, and we rejected them time after time.
We struggled with the shop drawings for the packaged HVAC system to be manufactured and tested in a factory, then shipped in pre-assembled sections to the site, the theory being the equipment could be assembled offsite while the building itself was still being built, saving time in the field. However, it didn’t seem the manufacturer, in this case a known entity, could competently produce shop drawings despite several conference calls to explain our concerns. We rejected these shop drawing more than once.
Meanwhile we were being deluges by RFIs, a good many of which seemed were attempts to find holes in the design allowing for substitute products, which we declined to accept. And the initial concrete work was having problems with honeycombing and misplaced column footings.
Concrete is poured inside formwork, so it’s poured blind around the steel rebar cages. It’s a trade requiring skilled workers to be done well, and a disaster when it’s done badly.
The County was in the middle of lawsuits on the concrete work done for the Silver Spring Transit Center which was then undergoing very expensive repairs to redo sections of bad concrete work found at that project. So the library project was being closely watched by an army of inspectors and the test agency whose job it was to ‘break’ cylinders cast from the same concrete being poured into the caissons, footing, shaft walls, et al. Cylinder breaks test concrete strength at 7 days (which gives an initial reading when something’s wrong) and at 28 days when the concrete reaches its design strength. The concrete being poured for the library was coming up OK in strength, but when the forms were stripped, the final product had multiple areas where it hadn’t fully filled around the stone aggregate and rebar, i.e. ‘honeycombing.’ In the more extreme cases, the hollow spaces ran inches deep into the walls.
Randy Haist’s crew issued a repair prescription involving an expensive epoxy concrete repair product that the contractors didn’t like. And they argued. And argued. For months.
For my part, I refused to sign off on the full monthly payments. Accompanying each approved pay req required my certification the work met the contract requirements, which clearly in the case of the concrete work wasn’t true. Withholding payment tends to piss off contractors–in this case, the general contractor who was self-performing the concrete work.
Added to the curtainwall shop drawings we were rejecting as unacceptable, the job meeting in the construction trailer were not cheerful affairs. And since his project manager hadn’t joined the project yet, it was Mr. Costello attending. Early on, he suggested we ‘take it outside.’ I replied in kind (and not kindly). Bill Robson said later he thought he’d have to separate us. My partner, Nick, loved telling the story of Costello being banned from the previous Civic Center project site for his behavior.
The work went slowly forward in spite of the arguments. But the project was falling behind schedule due to bad concrete and slowly delivering steel. Ike Leggett’s promised opening day was looking less likely. The County’s solution was to hire another consultant–these guys (they all were guys, mind) specialized in making everyone miserable, however they began loosening the County’s purse strings for marginally valid change orders, which moved things along. Our job was to advise the County on the contractors’ claims; what they chose to do with them were their business–it was above my pay grade as an architect I knew once said.
In the case of the unitized curtainwall, my recommendation was consistent: take the work away from the contractor and hire a better subcontractor–namely the company who’d worked with us to design it in the first place. The contract gave the County that right; they never chose to use it. Ironically, TSI was already working on the project to install the metal panel systems being used. They should have delivered the curtainwall as well.
When we received word that the foundations for the pavilion columns were poured in the wrong place–caused by a wrong layout of the arc geometry–we ordered a field survey be taken by the County’s inspection agency, and the structural engineers needed to come up with a fix. When it was discovered the steel trusses carrying the upper three floors were out of plane, another field survey was ordered, and the structural engineers needed to evaluate whether the mistake was fatal–fortunately it wasn’t. The upper level floor slab poured in a driving, freezing rain–violating standard practice as well as contract specs–required core samples and ultimately demolition of a large concrete section.
When the first trailer loads of curtainwall arrived from Florida, the news wasn’t great. A concerning number of the panels hadn’t survived the trip. And the cranes installing them didn’t help, yet a number of the shattered glass panels were hung anyway–keeping to a schedule. Shoot the drivers? Shoot the crane operator? The problem lay a few states south. And they were installing curtainwall that had never been approved by the architect of record.
We had our own issues regarding the curtainwall installation. A definition in the National Fire Safety Code required the curtainwall’s top attachments just below the slab level to be fire-rated. The glass would melt but the attachments would survive? At the same time it was discovered that several of the steel brackets attached to the main structure were wrong and required replacement.
Though slowly the building was framed, then closed in.
As the interiors were being completed, we discovered the metal fab subcontractor couldn’t deliver the necessary talent to manufacture the stainless steel railings and a second contractor was brought in at the last minute. The steel and granite staircases required a jeweler’s eye to assemble, and suffered as a result. And the main electrical contractor hadn’t put enough money into his bid–what suffered were the pendant lights, and custom handrail lights that never got installed.
Though the sub tasked with fabricating and installing the curvilinear hung ceiling clouds did a masterful job, working around problems some unforeseen and some created by the conflicting work of other trades. Costello’s project manager played a key role in getting it right. He was pushing the work and communicating such that decisions could be made.
Construction of one-of-a-kind buildings is tough, even with the best skilled workers. No beta testing to speak of, it gets erected for the first and only time. And when the structure is hung from the roof by giant trusses assembled mid-winter with welders in bucket trucks a hundred feet in subfreezing air, no one could accuse those folks of shirking.
The multiple tiers of responsibility among owner, the AE team and the contractor’s teams ensure communication is always a struggle. Public institutions don’t have unlimited budgets, AE teams and contractors alike work against fixed contracts and aren’t in it to run charities or they go out of business.
‘We can go out of business all on our own; we don’t need your project to help’ is an oft used expression, and is truer than many may appreciate. When a three-ring circus such as this is brought to a project as challenging as the Silver Spring Library, the best one can say at the end is thank god it’s over.
For those in the Washington region reading this, Maryland’s struggles to see the Purple Line to completion–with suits and counter-suits like fur flying–brings it all back, but I’m glad to miss it. I did my bit with Metro stations and don’t feel the urge for more.
When the Library streetcar station is finally open for business, I hope it will be an attractive addition to the Silver Spring Library–and Kefa Coffee’s friendly servers will be waiting to make coffee drinks for the transit riders just across from the station. Ride the escalators and check out the books. Walk the dog when you get home.
And if you want to know how those slaves dragged stones to Tutankhamun’s tomb, ask them when you get there.
