Engineered Architecture

I am staying in a 200 year old home on the coast of Maine. Real old timey place. One of the “modern” amenities is a beautiful old cast iron claw foot tub that has been rigged for a showers with a ceiling ring and hung curtain.
Every now and then I stay at a hotel with one of those fancy bowed out shower curtains to make a super sized shower. There is usually a note or even an embossed tile with the instructions, “Please put the curtain inside the tub when showering.”! I now know whom to blame for the late crop of flashing related building difficulties we have encountered! Shower door manufacturers! Since cheap and plentiful shower doors have become available, the current generation of designers and constructors have been missing this visual demonstration of how drainage planes and flashing works. Within the past year we have seen buildings where flashing was installed to conduct the water INTO the wall systems. Those designers and builders must be responsible for the sign in the hotels. They don’t know where to put the flashing or the shower curtain during rain showers.

I should also mention that all the water testing standards define failure as “no uncontrolled water leakage to the interior of the building. Let’s look at that language. I was walking through the jetway during a gully washer rainstorm. There are gutters that run along the edges of the passage way. That is controlled water. During window tests, I have seen standing water in the sill extrusion which eventually runs out to the exterior through the weep holes. That is controlled water. Many greenhouses have elaborate interior gutters that discharge outside. That is controlled water.
Let us not confuse visible water with uncontrolled water. This confusion leads to things like caulking up weep holes on the window systems, and yes, we have seen that done too many times.

This is what happens when there’s not enough reinforcing steel in a concrete assembly:

First, the apartment building was constructed. Afterward, the plan called for an underground garage to be dug out. The excavated soil was piled up on the other side of the building. Heavy rains resulted in water seeping into the ground. The building began to tilt. Then it began to shift and the “hollow” concrete pilings were snapped due to the uneven lateral pressures and lack of tensile strength from rebar or even welded wire fabric.
Again:
• An underground garage was being dug on the south side, to a depth of 15 feet.
• The excavated dirt was being piled up on the north side, to a height of 35 feet.
• The building experienced uneven lateral pressure from south and north.
• This resulted in a lateral pressure of 3,000 tons, which was greater than what the pilings could tolerate.

Many issues arise in the design,  construction and maintenance of buildings because of our firmly rooted habit of Denial. If we don’t see (know about, ask about, wonder about) it, it isn’t really happening. You may not believe some of the obvious mistakes a candid observer can see. As Yogi Berra said, (perhaps, he is also known for saying “most of the things I said, I didn’t say’), “you can observe a lot just by looking”. And another couplet of my own, “If you swim long enough in De Nile, you will get eaten by a crocodile”. Up to our ears in alligators probably had the same origin. So what have we seen?

1. Water in the basement/crawl. I was called by a homeowner who
   had been living in a five year old home in New Hampshire and
   was sure that the carpenter who had been re-hanging his basement
   doors was incompetent. They would work fine for six months and
   then have to be re-trimmed. He never looked beneath the floor.
   A quick excursion to the crawl space found a main carrier
   that was like moist shredded wheat. You could pull a handful
   off wherever you chose. Along a similar vein, my partner, Greg
   Trotter of Commercial Building Consultants, walked through an
   apartment complex that had just been blessed by an engineering
   due diligence firm as A+ with less than $1000 in immediate needs.
   One look beneath the floor sheathing (which had been conveniently
   removed because it was moldy and rotten, and you saw as much water
   as the underground cistern that fed the Topkapi Palace in Iatanbul, 
   (also forgotten over the years until someone wondered why the
   locals were pulling bricks up in the back yards and fishing)!
   
2. Whole beer bottles in the sewer line.Impossible. Even when the
   last piece of sewer line at a close elbow was removed and the 
   object discovered, there were those who said it couldn’t be
   there. Students on the roof, drinking beer and dropping the
   empties down the vent stack to hear the satisfying clatter of
   breaking glass managed to drop one during an (un)lucky flush
   the bottle floated around a couple of long radius bends until
   encountering a close bend.
3. Reflective cladding on Disney Hall. Who would have thought of
   this one:

   The building features Gehry’s trademark steel cladding —this time on polished concave surfaces that acted like parabolic mirrors to overheat nearby buildings and streets. Additional expense was incurred in the already expensive project to resolve the problem. (www.inetours.com copyright © 2001–2011 Lee W. Nelson)

   Once again reminding us that making things foolproof is difficult because fools are so clever.  There are plenty of new mistakes to make, so let’s stop repeating the old ones!

Commonsense would dictate that structure would have to be adequate to support us and our things against the pull of gravity. There is one notable exception in regions prone to earthquakes where all those physics formulae have to revisited and terms like acceleration and mass, not to mention Alquist Zones, but for today let’s just look at a commonsense way of looking at building structures:

1. The predominant direction of force of building weight and its dancing occupants and stuff is downward. Through the finish floor to floor sheathing, to joist, to beam, to post, to foundation wall, to footing, to well compacted subsoil, to mother earth. This being said, the aforementioned earthquakes and stormy winds can produce such a significant uplift as to counteract the weight of materials in place and throw them into the neighbors yard or street. Seen it. Beautiful Deck House, roof system in place, windows in on the lee side. Comes a gale and the roof flips over the shrubbery to the neighbor’s lawn. Fortunately no one was nearby. So we tie our structures down through an uninterrupted series of tension members to something weighty enough to prevent flight; usually the foundation.
2. If the path downward lines up the structure can be most efficient. Posts are way strong in holding up weight. Beams, not so much, so if posts land in mid-span of the beam below, prepare for a super-sized header. Post over beam over post is ideal. If the architects can’t make up their collective minds on floor plans, we assume the worst and put the point load at mid span, because if we don’t, that’s where they will want to put the post. Seen it.
3. This load transfer paradigm applies to all situations, Had to provide a triple top plate on a building where the constructors couldn’t land the roof trusses directly on top of the 16″ o.c. studs. Usually happens when someone decides to frame the walls at 16″ o.c. and the roof at 24″.

Everything is interconnected. My interest is linked to everyone else’s. Our survival and future are linked. Therefore the destruction of your so-called enemy is actually the destruction of your self….Daily Dalai Lama quote for 7/24/2011.

So it is almost a week later and I am wondering how I can tie a Tibetan holy man’s idea to building technology.  I think I will concentrate on the first part: creating shelter of necessity creates a system. A system that can be synthesized on a spreadsheet. If my insulation is twice as good, my heating and cooling systems may be half as large. More true in the heating than the cooling because a really well insulated building may not need any heating. An early active solar building I designed in the ’70’s was being (over)heated by a stuck 250 watt bathroom strip heater! Sprayed polyurethane combined with 6″ fiberglass. But remember:

1. If the envelope is twice as airtight, the ventilation system has to be twice as good. Leaky old envelopes didn’t need make up air. New tight envelopes need controlled fresh air, usually with some sort of Heat Recovery Ventilator (HRV).
2. If the envelope is twice as tight, irritants are twice as irritating. (See #1).
3. High performance glass can be wonderful thing in the winter, but mind the overhangs lest they cook you in the winter. This architects office had a plethora of vent fans in the great room/office.
   

   No southern overhangs!

Applying common sense is sometimes difficult in the face of adversity, but let’s apply it to insure our own temporary sustainance and sustenance:

1. It’s not the structures, it’s the missiles. Throw the patio furniture in the pool. Get rid of the stacks of extra studs and plywood. Batten down the hatches.
2. Avoid low ground. People still drown in underpasses. Trucks won’t run underwater and when they quit, it is always at the worst time.
3. Don’t go out to “Watch the storm come in.” ! Over a hundred spectators were drown in the storm surge standing on Point Judith during the 1938 hurricane. “Oh boy, I got a picture!”, is usually followed by other unrecorded expletives from the drowned observer. There were great shots of the tsunami in Thailand recovered from camera chips separated from their departed owners.

Tom Wolfe wrote an interesting little book years ago called from Bauhaus to Our House. Decrying the loss of ornament and “homey-ness” of our ascetic architectural style in modern buildings. (“O beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, has there ever been another place on earth where so many people of wealth and power have paid for and put up with so much architecture they detested as within thy blessed borders today?-from Tom Wolfe). Enter the NAHB with their cover story “Homes of the Year”. Multi-gabled, bloated, and proud to call themselves MacMansions. Everyone has to have one. It is the American Dream! Remember:

1. Stuff expands to fill the space available. Even in the budget busting great rooms of palatial “Homes of the Year”, which first looked like intergalactic space with sparse furnishings, lest you have to get a second mortgage to afford enough furniture; eventually furnishings and ephemera accumulate to fill the void. Nature abhors a vacuum. Empty closets demand more clothes. Full basements and barns can act like black holes attracting all those things too good to throw out, or to be saved for the grandchildren. Believe me, I know, I just went through five families accumulation in an old Maine barn. I could hear the sigh of relief as the barn rose from its gravitational oppression. Remember:
2. You mean we have to heat and cool this space? Even though we have made strides in envelope insulation, double the R, double the area and you are back to square one.
3. It takes a lot of paint to paint a jumbo home. And wash all those windows. Maintenance can exceed mortgages five years into a large, badly detailed, complex MacMansion. ‘Nuf said.

Well over a hundred years ago, Chief Seattle 

is believed to have said these words:

This we know.  The earth does not belong to us, we belong to the earth. This we know.  All things are connected like the blood which unites one family.  All things are connected.  Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons and daughters of the earth.  We did not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand of it.  Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves . . . .

1. We don’t need to save the planet, it is the species that is in jeopardy.
2. Everything we do affects something else.
3. We need to work together. Peace