Koolhaas and Foster in Dallas for Unveilings

by Stephen Sharpe, Editor of Texas Architect

Once in a generation, if not a lifetime, do architectural events occur such as 

those that took place on Oct. 15-16 at the Dallas Arts District. Two Pritker Prize-winning architects – Rem Koolhaas and Lord Norman Foster – were on hand to help unveil their long-awaited additions to the Arts District. Both made individual presentations to gatherings that filled their respective buildings. A third lecture was presented by Josua Prince-Ramus, who designed the Wyly with Koolhaas before departing Koolhaas’ firm OMA (Office of Metropolitan Architecture) and completed the project through his own firm, REX (Ramus Ella Architects) .

(Photo of the Wyly Theatre at right by Stephen Sharpe.)

Media tours during the morning on Thursday, Oct. 15, allowed architectural journalists to walk through the completed projects with the three architects. Texas Architect was represented by Willis Winters, FAIA, who serves as one of the magazine’s contributing editors. (Also on the tours was Michael Malone, AIA, a member of the TSA Publications Committee who covered the events for TheaterJones.com, an online collaboration of two theater critics based in Dallas. In the photo of Koolhaas on the right, Malone stands in the background.)

(Photos below by Daylon Walton courtesy TheaterJones.com.)

On Thursday afternoon I joined the celebrations, arriving from Austin in time to catch Koolhaas’ lecture in the main performance space of the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre. Deedie Potter Rose, a member of the search committee that selected Koolhaas for the project, introduced Koolhaas. Rose, well known for her largess within the arts community in Dallas and statewide, and her husband, Rusty Rose, have given $10 million to the Dallas Center for the Performing Arts (now called the AT&T Performing Arts Center), the umbrella organization that funded the construction and operations of the Wyly and Winspear. Their gift led to the naming of the Wyly’s main performance space as the Potter Rose Performance Hall.

Koolhaas, adorned in a bright green long-sleeve knit shirt, filled the 600-seat theater. Having burst on the international stage with 1978 book, “Delirious New York,” Koolhaas pretty much stuck to the same script he has presented to audiences for the past three decades—how he was seduced by the vertical city after he moved to NYC in the early 1970s. While he included a few slides of the Wyly, Koolhaas only spoke about the project as it adhered to his interest in stacking a project’s programmatic elements. I was not the only one who was disappointed that Koolhaas did not engage the audience in a question-and-answer session following his speech.

While some pundits report that Koolhaas and Prince-Ramus do not speak to each other, observers said there was no obvious tension between the two designers during the tours earlier that morning.

Prince-Ramus, who served as OMA’s project architect for the Wyly and then continued in that role after leaving Koolhaas’ firm and opening REX in 2006, had his turn on Friday afternoon to speak about the Wyly to a packed house. Prince-Ramus spent more time on the Wyly than Koolhaas, even answering a few questions at the end of his talk. 

Earlier on Friday, Norman Foster (both a “Sir” and a “Lord”) spoke to a large group in the main performance hall of the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House. Unfortunately for everyone except those at the very front, the first half of his lecture was almost completely inaudible due to a poorly synched public address system—a distressing malfunction for the opening of such an otherwise exquisitely crafted fine-arts project. Alerted by audience members of the snafu, Foster, resplendent in an orchid-hued sport coat, seemed unfazed despite the echo that reverberated through the room as he clicked through slides illustrating his collaborations with Buckminster Fuller and the early projects of Foster + Partners. The problem was fixed by the time he reached the topic of the Winspear, which he discussed only slightly in the context of his firm’s latest work.

Extreme Collaboration: Working With Subcontractors

by Dean Barnes
Associate Principal
Morris Architects, Houston

We're designing a lot of projects in BIM. That's proven valuable within the design team. Architects, mechanical engineers, and structural engineers are working together better, creating a coordinated design model. But then, for the most part, we're printing 2-D drawings because that's what most general contractors are looking for. It is frustrating to be unable to share all your efforts as the project is bid and moves into construction. You find yourself trying to find someone- anyone- to take the model.

On the recently completed Rice University South Plant project we found, for the first time, a subcontractor who wanted our model.

On a central plant project, the mechanical systems are even more critical than they are on a typical building. MEP doesn't support the program; it is the program. During the design process, we used the mechanical engineer's model to make sure the systems fit in the building. That was invaluable. But the designer's model will always be a design intent model. Without all of the equipment selected, without the detailing of pipes completed, it’s a useful approximation, but still an approximation.

When we found that the mechanical contractor WANTED the model, we were, of course, eager to share it. We thought it would help with the coordination drawings and the submittals, making our job easier. Little did we understand, they intended to model the entire mechanical system. Their goal was to create a highly detailed model of the mechanical components including specific equipment, valves, gauges, pumps and other accessories. We understood this level of detail would enable the mechanical contractor to fabricate as much of the system components off site as possible, reducing their field assembly, modification, and adjustments. The BIM model became a three dimensional shop drawing.

What we learned was this level of detailed modeling also provided the opportunity for the University’s operators to review and understand where different components of the mechanical system would be located, as well as how components could be accessed for repair and replacement if needed but also for operation. The University knew how to operate the system before any piece was fabricated or installed.

We brought not just the university’s planners and architects but also the central plant operators into the process. We walked them through the virtual model and discussed the details of operating the plant: ladders and catwalks, access to valves and gauges, and how components could be changed out. That feedback lead to several design changes, including a new catwalk in the boiler room.

But, thanks to the precision of prefabrication, that did not impact schedule or cost. The university got a better building, on time and on budget. It also had the early knowledge to eliminate the “Not what we expected” experience upon completion of the construction.

Because BIM is a fundamentally different way of designing a building and its components, we should continue to seek collaboration with contractors, subcontractors and fabricators. As the South Plant project shows, that will lead to better buildings. Architecture is ultimately about the building- the space people will experience and use- not about the plans, which are just a way to get there.

Countdown to TSA Convention in Houston

Boxes are packed and are stacking up as the TSA office prepares to head to Houston in anticipation of the 70th Annual TSA Convention, Oct. 22-24.  Awards ceremonies, continuing education sessions, tours, and a host of other activities are planned during the three-day event. Click here for more information.

Guest Blog: Extreme Collaboration

Promoting BIM and the Dangers of Overselling
by Andy MacPhillimy
Principal
Morris Architects, Houston

Does you firm need more work, more backlog? Are your markets more competitive than ever before?

In the various markets for architectural and engineering consulting services, competition has gotten very tight. Many firm qualifications and selling points look very similar. To achieve a competitive advantage, firms continue to seek unique ways to differentiate themselves and stand out. The advent of Building Information Modeling, for those firms who are early adopters, has given these firms just such an opportunity.

About 10 years ago, the growing interest and awareness of sustainable design and the LEED rating system gave firms a similar opportunity. Many firms geared up by getting their staff LEED accredited and by developing their “green design” knowledge and skills. When they took this to their clients, they were disappointed to find a very skeptical reception. Selling clients on sustainability was difficult as most saw green design as too touchy-feely and too costly, with benefits difficult to validate or appreciate. It has taken a while to reach that tipping point where clients and building owners recognized the market benefits and understood the economics of sustainable design. Now there is wide acceptance and adoption of green and sustainable design across many markets. Sustainable design knowledge and skills are fairly widespread and no longer serve as a strong differentiator for firms.

Selling BIM to clients in this early stage of adoption has met similar skepticism and produces comments like: “OK, as long as it doesn’t cost me more” or “I don’t care how you do it, I still want my record drawings in DWG files!” But with the benefits being easy to understand-- and it is fairly straightforward to demonstrate economic benefit to the client-- willingness to accept BIM’s use will likely be much swifter… and herein lies the danger to the consultants and contractors sharing their BIM knowledge and skills with clients – the potential to unduly raise expectations and oversell BIM.

For those enlightened firms and individuals who have gained knowledge of BIM (and a clear vision of where BIM will lead the consulting professions and the AEC industry), it is easy to want to share that knowledge with each other and with our perspective clients. In an earlier blog, we discussed “lonely BIM” and “social BIM.” Though BIM benefits the lone adopter, the benefits multiply tremendously as we begin to share the models, completing class detections, allowing real-time coordination, the opportunity for continuous tack-offs and estimating, constructability reviews, early visualizations and more….

When you reach that magical moment and see the future that BIM will create, you want it to be here now. But that day is not here yet. There are many technical gaps, legal canyons, or huge entrenched processes that will challenge this ultimate BIM world of our future. When we share our own firm's capabilities and paint this marvelous future that BIM will bring, we need to control client expectations. Once our clients hear of the great successes- or claims of successes by comrades or competitors on other projects - such as zero field changes due to mechanical equipment clashes, or a dramatic reduction in RFI’s, or reduced schedule and costs of change orders due to both the previous items….clients are going to rapidly move from skeptic to believer and expect…or maybe demand these same results.

There are also software vendors selling their product capabilities to not only the consultant world; they are also selling BIM’s capabilities to major clients in an effort to get them to demand that their consultant teams ramp up and produce their projects in BIM. Their desire to sell product similarly leads to the tendency to sell the strong points and leave out the remaining challenges facing full and effective adoption.

The potential challenge is that they are not familiar with impact of BIM on the design process, as well as implications on timing for decision making. They have heard the promise of BIM from each hopeful consultant. Yet, they have not yet begun to change their own internal thinking to relate to the current state of capability in the industry in general, and the particular group of consultants and contractors that serve them.

If you are lucky enough to be an early adopter and have now developed great internal BIM skills, have an increasing community of consultants and contractors that share these skills - it will only benefit you and the industry to go out and tout BIM and its great promise to clients and the AEC industry. But remember to take time to properly frame the status of the industries’ adoption and properly set expectations. Take time to let the client know the current state of capabilities, the challenges ahead, what the industry is doing to meet those challenges, and most importantly, help the client understand how BIM can ultimately help them better meet their business goals and what particular steps and approach are appropriate for them to participate in the continuing adoption of Building Information Modeling!

Look for our future posts: we're working on upcoming installments, including:

· BIM coordination with Subcontractors
· Model Ownership
· BIM and Architecture Schools
· The Pain of your First BIM Project

We'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts. If we get some good stories, we'll add them to our posts. If you have topic ideas, we can address those. Contact Andy MacPhillimy or Christof Spieler at:   andy.macphillimy@morrisarchitects.com or Christof.spieler@morrisarchitects.com

Guest Blog: "What Happened to Drawing?"

Michael J. Malone, AIA
Studio Director, The Michael Malone Studio
WKMC Architects, Inc., Dallas

Last year at the 2008 TSA Convention in Fort Worth, I presented a program that addressed a question that had been nagging at me for several years, What Happened to Drawing? Specifically, I wanted to initiate a discussion regarding the role of hand drawing, both sketching and drafting, in our profession and whether or not it was still relevant to what we do as architects in the creation and documentation of our work. More importantly, I wanted to know if it was becoming something quaint and precious that was going the way of negative photography, record stores, and newspapers…something that we’d all tell our children and grandchildren about, one of those “back in my day” reminiscences like when my grandfather used to tell me about riding a horse to school. The program last year was so well attended and the ensuing discussion and questions so engaging and animated that I am offering it again this year in Houston.

It’s my belief that unless we discuss it and as a profession we have a consensus about it, there won’t be anyone who draws by hand left in our profession within a generation. If you think about it, the way we as a group of professionals have defined ourselves for literally centuries has been by our almost unique ability to draw and our use of drawings as a communication tool.

I started architectural school in 1976, and one of the first classes I took in college was freehand drawing. My earliest design studios required keeping sketchbooks as a way to begin to record the world around us and to develop our skills and facility at drawing. In part I went to architectural school because I loved to draw and in college was surrounded by people of like mind and inclination.
I do a fair amount of interviewing potential hires for intern positions in my studio and have a wider exposure to young architects through my mentoring efforts in conjunction with our local AIA chapter. For the last several years, I have reviewed portfolios of young people with no hand drawing at all to represent their projects, even as concept sketches. If I ask them if they’ve done any hand drawings as part of their architectural education, I basically get two responses: the first is that their professors have told them that we in the profession only want to see computer drawings as a condition of considering them for a position or second that hand drawing wasn’t required for them to develop or present their projects in school. Both answers concern me because they suggest there is an inclination away from hand drawings in the academy. I am curious if this is because our collegiate schools of architecture feel that’s what they need to do to prepare young architects for the profession or if it is the inclination of the schools themselves? Either way the results are the same and drawing as a tool, a means of expression, a way to develop an idea, an artistic expression, and a means of communication is both diminished and in danger of being lost.

I am interested in knowing if the changes we are seeing are necessary, a sign of the times and the progress of the world, or if they are driven by forces outside our profession and the way we practice. It’s my intention to find this out through discussion and dialogue with as many people as are interested in the discussion itself and who feel they are vested in any of the possible points of view and outcomes.

Add your comments on this topic to the TSA blog and be a part of the ongoing discussion. Attend the TSA Convention in Houston and sign up for CE Session 109059 to hear more on this topic from Michael Malone, Saturday, Oct. 24, at 1:30 p.m.

Sketches by Michael Malone.

Guest Blog: Extreme Collaboration

Interns in a BIM World
Lauren Stassi
Associate and ACA BIM Manager
Morris Architects, Orlando, Florida

BIM is quickly the changing atmosphere of many architectural firms. BIM can affect every facet of architectural work, from design through construction, when used to its full advantage. Architectural interns have a much different set of skills to develop early in their career when working in BIM instead of only 2D drafting. There is great opportunity to use BIM to teach interns and young architects to think in 3D. BIM however is only a tool; in order to complete an accurate model, interns need guidance in building design and construction (as well as the software) from the day they begin.


The typical role for an architectural intern on a project team producing documents in 2D starts with a manager passing down simple ‘red line’ tasks for the intern to complete with basic guidance. Often these tasks will not involve much knowledge of design or construction. At the beginning, an intern only needs to understand how to change the 2D line work to match the ‘red lines’. As an intern continues their development by learning the software and increasing their understanding of building design, documentation and construction, they will complete involved tasks like coordinating changes between plan section and elevation and developing details. During the construction phase, an intern will see how their 2D drawings apply to the 3D world and will often uncover issues that were never resolved in the 2D drawings.

BIM gives an intern access to see the coordination of a project far sooner than they would in a 2D world. By working in plan, section, and elevation simultaneously, an intern, and the entire project team, is able to understand how to put together a building. Since the intern is generally the team member who will become the most skilled in 3D modeling, they are also the most likely to discover unresolved issues as they build the model. The great benefit of BIM is that this discovery can happen as soon as modeling starts, instead of lingering until the construction phase. BIM allows an intern the opportunity to see these issues and learn how to resolve them much earlier in their career than 2D drafting did. The greater the intern’s knowledge of building systems the better equipped the intern will be for this new responsibility.

BIM is only a tool; it cannot make decisions or choices, it does not know correct from incorrect, it can defy gravity and constructability, and it does not have a 'Finish Construction Documents' button. It is important for the success of a project that an intern has direct communication with team members with technical design and construction experience to guide them to model pragmatically in order to complete accurate usable documentation.




In 2D, an intern could pick up changes with a basic understanding of the software and without much supervision. In BIM, an intern has a much longer learning curve before they can complete tasks on their own because redlines are not a simple task of moving or trimming a line anymore. An intern needs to understand the software to determine if they need to adjust an object's location or type in order to ‘delete a line.’ They need to ask themselves and their team members - what are the impacts of editing an object- did every object of that type in the entire project just change? If the object is adjusted, will there be a gap in the model? Is it necessary for that object to be modeled in that location, but the display in plan needs to be adjusted? Because so much of the documentation is tied to what is built in the model, an intern needs to develop not only their software and building technical design skills at a much quicker rate in order to complete what were once simple 'red line' tasks.

Interns need a team that will assist them in learning how to use the software and how to build the model accurately as soon as they are on a project. There needs to be a team member who has construction experience that is also familiar enough with the software tools to guide the intern to make appropriate decisions and choices on how to model accurately. Without timely communication between the modeling team and the manager, the model can quickly get far off course. It will be too late if the manager waits until the week before the deadline to look at a check set.

Interns can use BIM to further their own education about building design and documentation at a much faster pace than ever before. To use this tool, interns also need to accept responsibility for modeling and documenting accurately. BIM cannot make decisions, and if an inexperienced intern makes decisions beyond their level of knowledge, the domino effects can be considerable. The ease to change object types globally for a project has great efficiency, but it becomes the intern's responsibility to understand all of the impacts of that change to a project. If a door size is changed globally, will the design still meet code? Are all of the clearances and required widths still met? As an intern learns to think through these impacts, they will quickly become an indispensible asset to the project team. Interns need to learn what can be modeled, but more importantly, they need to learn how and what should be modeled. An integral part of BIM's success will be the dedication that interns put towards learning the responsibilities of building design and construction, and not only focusing on the complex objects that can be modeled.

Texas Architect E-magazine Now Available

The Sept/Oct 2009 Design Awards issue of Texas Architect has been reinvented online to complement the print edition. Read the full issue in beautiful, new e-magazine format on the TSA Web site. Flip through Texas Architect pages, gaze at full-size images, and read as if you had the magazine in your hands. This new online format allows the entirety of the editorial content in the print edition to be presented—exactly as seen in the print version.

Through the end of 2009, all editorial content will be available to the public in the new format. Starting with the Jan/Feb 2010 edition, as a TSA member or Texas Architect subscriber, you will be able to view the entirety of Texas Architect’s editorial content by logging in to the TSA Web site with either your AIA member number or subscriber ID number if you are not a TSA member. (Subscriber ID numbers will be assigned and printed prominently on the subscriber’s magazine mailing label.) If you are neither a TSA member nor a Texas Architect subscriber, you will see a sample version of the current magazine online in e-magazine format. Once you subscribe online, your subscriber ID will be generated and sent to you via email, allowing you to then log in to see the entirety of editorial content.

As a TSA member or subscriber, you will also be able to access complete online archives beginning in 2010. Archives will be in user-friendly e-magazine format with easy access from your own desktop.

Starting reading the current issue online now.