ARE 5.0 Project Development & Documentation Exam Prep

The previous exam we were talking about, design issues and kind of opportunities, sort of trying to nail down, trying to get what the final design was on this exam. What we're really looking at is kind of taking those sort of final design concepts and trying to make them manifest in one way or another. So we are kind of zooming in on the kind of details and specifics in order to make our project goals come true from the beginning of these different exams.

We'll do some scenario considerations, so that's where we're kind of looking at some issues kind of from a side angle in order to make sure that we're not getting overly focused on just the detail, but that we really have a chance to sort of step back and kind of think about it a little bit. The NCARB folks have expressly said that that's their intention is to get you to focus more on kind of situations, and being able to make reasonable decisions from a set of information. So we're trying to move away from kind of direct question and answer, and more, here's a series of different pieces of information.

We have a system for going through which is why I keep referring back to the project goals, to the code analysis, to the cost analysis because we wanna go back to those original ideas, make sure we're still on the same track. And then check our cost and our code analysis to make sure that we're not doing something that's gonna cost us trouble as we try to make the leap into getting a permit or into construction. And have our cost suddenly go skyrocketing or have an inspector say, "Wait, you can't do that." We wanna have all that worked out before hand and by doing these reviews at each of the different sections at the end of schematic design, at the end of design development.

Now would be the time to make sure, sort of analyze back through, does it meet the code analysis? Does it meet all the structural needs? Can we afford to do it the way that we are planning on doing it?

So, just like in the architectural systems, just like in the structural systems, we're making sure that we're checking out how our systems, our mechanical systems, are meeting our project goals. How are they helping, especially in terms of flexibility, especially in terms of efficiency, but also in terms of comfort, and somebody wanting to be there, feeling productive having all of those kinds of meaningful relationships to this new building. How is this system helping that process, and, obviously, meeting the cost analysis and meeting the code analysis.

So you can imagine for maybe a hospital, instead of having recycled air, where we're taking air from the waiting rooms where there's a bunch of coughing and sick people, and we're reconditioned that with a tiny percentage of fresh new air, you know, we may actually take only a little bit of return air, and actually have quite a bit of fresh air coming in from the outside, because we just don't wanna have that contaminated air, sort of finding it's way back into the system. So depends on the situation. In other scenarios where there's not so many people, where there's not so many people breathing, there's not a lot of equipment that's sort of contaminating the air, I may have a very small percentage of fresh air being brought into a process, because it's just not as important as it is in an office setting.

It could be that we're talking in the summertime, and we're actually having conductance of heat in, but, just for simplicity's sake, let's think of it as wintertime and we're gonna think of we're losing heat out through that wall assembly. So we're trying to make sure that the assemblies that we put together have logical levels of resistance to the flow of the heat. The more heat that can go through any one square foot, that means the bigger heating system I need.

And then the interior air film is, I think it's usually .67, something like that, so we're round down 'cause I've been rounding up on some of the others, so I'm just gonna call that point five just to kind of make our lives a little easier here. So we can start to add these together and I've got one plus five, so that's six, seven, eight plus a little bit. So I'm gonna call that an R-value of eight point, let's say point two.

Conduction is when two bodies are touching each other and the warm body is giving heat to the cool body. So, if I have a cold rock that I pick up, the warm body of my hand is going to be giving heat to the cold body of the rock. Lots of other architectural examples, but I think that's sort of visceral, and is important from a standpoint of, how we move heat around and use it in buildings.

And when we talk about comfort, we're talking about both temperature and humidity level. Can't really understand temperature without understanding the humidity level. We can't really understand the humidity level without understanding the temperature.

And while most architects won't spend very much time with the psychrometric chart, it really is something that a mechanical engineer would really be doing for you, but it is important to be able to understand the issues of the psychrometric chart, so when you're talking to a mechanical engineer, you can understand while they're talking about being able to remove the moisture in the air, or to be able to move the sensible temperature one way or the other, and, therefore, what the total energy outlay or potentially even dollar outlay for that amount of energy, you can understand that conversation and you can be part of that discussion. So the exam's not really gonna expect you to be fully-versed in these issues and these concepts, but you should be able to have a conversation reasonably with a mechanical engineer in order to be able to have input back and forth in the conversation.

We might have convective currents set up for most of the time for cooling and for heating, but then we'll have a little supplemental heat, maybe around the perimeter or near the windows or near the doorway, with either hydronic or an electric or an IR system or something, just to give a little bit of extra heat in those sort of situations so that we don't put ourselves in a dangerous situation where pipes will start to freeze or people get cold and unpleasant if the air-based system just can't keep up, so most of the commercial scale buildings we're talking about will actually have some combination, of which they'll mostly focus on convection for the cooling but then will also have the supplemental other elements for heating when that's necessary. They don't have to; you can certainly have places around the country that just have a little bit of heating or places that just have a little bit of cooling, but that concept, the kind of average across the country, you're really talking about most places are gonna have both in at least some level, maybe only a little supplement to a convection system, but there'll be something there, typically. When it comes to residential systems, residential systems tend to be one or the other.

You need to have concrete or tile or stone or something that's gonna be a really good radiator for it to really work, so it doesn't always work well for wood floors or other scenarios that just aren't in that kind of vein, but it's a great system for getting that heat out exactly where you want it, but like it said, what if we were doing this for cooling? If we were doing this for cooling, as the air is sort of blowing around and coming down near the floor, the coolness that would be in the pipes, which would eventually make that concrete cool and then that concrete would be acting as part of a radiant exchange with our bodies, our bodies would be the hot bodies, and the concrete would be the cold body, and so our bodies would be radiating heat to the concrete, which as I said is not automatically as efficient as when the concrete is radiating heat to us. Our bodies just don't work quite as well that way, but it would work to some degree, and so we could do it, so we would have our bodies radiating heat to the cool entity of the slab, and then that air would be the coolest air in the room and would be coming down, and it would be getting cooler because it's down near a cold slab, so the warmer air is up higher, and that warm air has quite a bit of moisture in it cuz it's inside, and we've been sweating and breathing and cooking spaghetti and all those things, and so we have a lot of moisture in the air.

Clearly the design temperature for the interior is a target number that you're shooting for and the design temperature for the exterior is a sort of general, average coldest number or warmest number, depending if we're talking cooling or heating. And it would be something that we'd pick up out of a chart. So one is a target, one is sort of an actual number from averages over the years.

It's gonna be a whole bunch of these as different numbers that we're gonna add together, but each one of them is gonna start with the U-value times the area of that particular wall assembly or roof assembly, whatever it is, times the delta-t, the difference in temperature from the target temperature we're shooting for and the design temperature in that kind of worst case scenario outside. So, in the Minnesota example, where it might be minus 20 and our target temperature is, say, 68, that means we have a delta-t of approximately 88 degrees. So, that tells us that we need to be putting a lot of heat energy into that heating system in order for it to balance out the loss of heat through those walls, through the transmission through the roof assembly, through the wall assembly, et cetera.

Once you have all those things, you can run through that whole set of calculations like we were just talking about, and that's gonna give us our total heat loss in the worst case scenario, at this 99% or 99.6% scenario and then we're going to be able to calculate from that what our heating system load is, and therefore we can choose a heating system.

We're then gonna estimate the temperature of unheated areas 'cause there's gonna be some spots, like maybe a garage or something like that, that we're gonna have an outside wall to, but it's not gonna be the outside air temp. It will be some middle ground temperature, so we need to estimate what that would be, 'cause that's gonna have a different delta-T for that area of wall surface or roof surface or whatever it is. We're then gonna calculate all those areas of the assemblies.

So with degree days we have heating degree days and cooling degree days, and the way that we start to think about this is we have a baseline which is 65 degrees, so we have a 65 degree baseline, and then we're trying to figure out how much time, over the span of a year, is this particular location, just on the averages, the way that information has been built up over time, we have a whole series of meteorological books available to us to figure this stuff out, so on average, across the span of the year, how much time is it less than 65 degrees, and how much time is it more than 65 degrees, so from a heating degree day, if it's above 65 degrees for any amount of time, well then that amount of time registers as zero, because we don't get any benefit for the fact that it's above that, we're just looking for how big our heating system's gonna be, and how much energy it's gonna take to have the heating system on, we don't get free money back just because it was warm enough that we didn't have to have our heating system on, so if it's above 65, that's just a zero, just zeroes out in the calculation, if it's below 65, then what we're doing is we're taking the high and the low, and we're averaging them, so we have an average temperature across the span of the day, and then we're comparing that average temperature to the 65, and if it's below, we can subtract that number from the 65 and it'll give us an idea of how much below that day is than our basic 65 number, which is gonna give us a little bit of leeway, the building's sort of assumed to be okay if it gets a little cooler than our target number, but if it gets a lot cooler, we have to start adding that heating, so that's how we're figuring out how much heating across the year we have to put in. So remember, the times when it's above the 65 doesn't count, but all the times when that average is below the 65 and it will tell us the total number of degree days, heating degree days that we have to add to in order, across the span of a year, because that's a really important question for us, because we really wanna know how much the energy's gonna cost, and how big of system this is across the whole span of time, so that's a clear understanding of what we're trying to get to, it's important to know what the worst case scenario is, because we have to be able to meet that, but we also wanna have an understanding how much money this is really gonna cost in order to run this building through the year, so heating degree days, exactly the same thing with cooling, we still use 65, we just average it, and then it goes the other direction, and obviously if it's below 65, we just count it as zero, in the same way that if it was above 65 in heating degree day, we counted it as zero. So this is just a way of understanding the heat loss across the span of a year so we can really understand the scale of how much energy and money it's gonna take to keep this building heated through that year.

And, then, we're gonna do a similar thing for the infiltration and for the ventilation if we're doing anything for ventilation in this, and we're gonna be able to add up those total numbers and have a full total BTU heat loss that we're compensating with our heating system or our cooling system, so, from this, once we have that total loss, we now know how much energy in total through a year, now obviously it's averaged, so it's not necessarily an exact number, that we're saying this is what it would be generally, typically, on a typical year, so we have a pretty darn good idea of what the total heat loss is gonna be for that year, so, therefore, we have a pretty good idea of how much heat we're gonna have to put into the system through our heating system or cooling system if we're talking the other way, and if we understand the cost of the fuel, well, if we know how much the heat loss is gonna be, we know how much heat we have to put in, and we know how much the fuel costs, and we know how much heat we get out of the fuel, we could figure our what our annual costs are and so we can determine what our total fuel use and costs to get that fuel, we could have all of that sort of figured out for us. So, not only would that be useful because it's just handy to know how much everything's gonna cost, but also, if we're trying to do any sort of lifecycle comparisons, so let's say we have two different systems that we're considering putting in for one project, if we just look at, say, the first cost and the efficiency of the unit, well that'll tell us something, first cost, one's gonna be more expensive than the other and in terms of straight efficiency, one will presumably be more efficient than the other, but that isn't really all that telling. What we really wanna know is what in terms of the actual use, how much will that efficiency be meaningful over the span of the year.

So clearly, it's very useful to have the overall yearly heating load on a building, because that's how we're gonna understand the scale of the the energy use, and the scale of the fuel costs and all of that over a span of time, and will allow us to do all these different sorts of comparisons. But when it comes to actually sizing the various components of the system, we actually probably want to start looking more at a room by room type heating load question. So the full system, we can look at to sort of have a sense of the scale of like, how big the boiler is, how big the furnace is.

And that's gonna happen at a certain temperature, that's gonna happen in a certain way that we're gonna generate a lot of heat or we're gonna generate as much cooling as we reasonably can. And then, we're gonna take that heat or cooling and we're gonna spread it around the building. So we're gonna move it from wherever the mechanical room is to the offices, to the conference rooms to the bedrooms, to the living rooms.

The heating, we're really gonna be talking about something that's probably working at about six hundred degrees. Could be, actually much higher then that even. When we're talking about the generation point.

If we're doing a radiant system for heating, and an air based system for cooling, well then that's a different question. But if we're trying to do both of these things together, into one system, then the cooling is going to be the harder thing. And therefore, that's the one that we're really going to be focused on.

So we're mostly gonna be talking about hydronic hot water heating systems and then air-based heating systems. So when we talk about the distribution for the heating, we're gonna be talking about duct work for the air-based and piping for the hydronic system. When we talk about the termination for the air-based, it's gonna be diffusers.

One of the greatest things, I think, about the in-floor radiant is I might actually keep the temperature much lower in the space, but feel just as warm because my feet are warm because the things are reasonably warm. So I might have the space be at 65 or 66 degrees, something like that, whereas, with a air-based system, in order to feel comfortable I might have it at 72, 73, 74, something like that, so I'm raising the heat of the system in order to feel comfortable but that wouldn't necessarily be what I was calculating it on. So, we probably were calculating it on the idea of it being 68 for both of them, so from a calculation standpoint, I might get a very different number in terms of what's the most efficient than in an actual setting where people will use them very differently.

What we want is we want the heat that we're supplying to be battling with the cold from outside at the perimeter wall so that everywhere inside the space is all at a comfortable level. So in general, we're always going to want to push towards that perimeter. Another reason is that, uh, as we have these big differences between indoor and outdoor temperatures it's very easy to have a situation where we have relatively warm temperatures on the inside with kind of humidity and people breathing and sweating, and as I said before, cooking spaghetti.

We think about the zones from the overall way that the building is gonna gain and lose heat at different times of the day and different times of the season so that we can make it as reasonable and logical as possible. And then we size all those branches and all those lines as a way to sort of balance out that system. And we're choosing either radiators, thin tube base boards, in-floor systems.

And then in the basement, because I have such a different type of heat loss in the basement, so the basement counts as square footage but I'm not gonna be losing anywhere near the same amount of heat loss through that basement wall because the soils will actually kind of, even though they're very very low from an R value standpoint, they're actually quite useful as a heat sync standpoint so they kind of keep that heat generally around the building so it just doesn't get as cold outside when it's the outside is the ground when you're in the basement as it does in the air up above. So I need to have a system down in the basement but I don't need to have anywhere near the same amount of actual radiators down in the basement. So you might actually get away with just having the hot water pipes just by themselves run around the perimeter, maybe up in the ceiling even and maybe I'd run them back and forth a little bit.

That riser's gonna come up through, it's gonna find its way towards the perimeter. It's gonna run around the perimeter, and then it's gonna find its way back. Gonna have another one come up, run around another portion of the perimeter, and it's gonna find its way back.

And the reason I would start to have those kinds of meaningful zones is because I may have periods of time I want the building to be open and reasonably conditioned, but I don't need that, because the classrooms aren't gonna be used for the weekend or something like that, I can sort of turn those off except for having just a little bit of warm water running through those systems. So, you can balance the building and zones by the use of the spaces, or it could be that we say, all right, all the floors on the south side, all the rooms on the south side, we'll have those on one zone and then all the rooms on the east side, we'll have those on one zone and kind of do it from a climatic and orientation standpoint. Either way, you're sort of balancing these systems up for meaningful reasons, you're making sure that most of the warmth is going towards the perimeter because that's where the problems are gonna be and that you're having less piping in the middle of the space either by, like I was showing here where some of the loops just don't go there or maybe you have pipes that are just far apart from each other and as they get towards the perimeter, get closer, something along those lines.

But if I have to have both heating and cooling, like most commercial settings do, then I'm likely to use an air-based system at least in part, it may be in combination, but at least in part, I'm likely to use an air-based system because of the fact that the cooling is gonna be there and the cooling probably wants to be air-based. Commercial settings, I'm gonna need to have a certain amount of ventilation. In those residential settings, I can often get that ventilation from operable windows.

So whenever you're talking about a cooling system, if there's any question about moisture in the air, what you're really saying here is the fact of cooling is going to automatically dehumidify the air. Now, that's actually a good thing generally. Almost always when we're trying to take comfort, we are both trying to cool the sensible temperature as well as that latent temperature, the humidity level in the air, in the vapor in that space.

And so, if we just imagine that this loop of refrigerant in this pipe has these little moments where the pressure is altered, so in this one, we're going to compress it, and in this one, we're going to let it expand. So, we're going to compress it to a really intense pressure in this thing there, hence a compressor, and then this would be the expansion valve, which is going to let it go to a much lighter pressure. When we compress it down, that's going to make the refrigerant very hot.

Typically, that trunk line would actually go vertically, but it just is a little harder to draw and make it make sense in this context, so we're just gonna have it go straight out the side for the moment. And then as it goes into that trunk line, there's gonna be a whole series of different branch lines that are each going to branch off from the trunk line. It could be one branch, could be a hundred branches.

So we'll look at a couple of different issues and a couple of different examples in a minute but just sort of that simple idea, air handling unit, its got some way that it's getting either hot or cold into its coil, blowing that air out into the system that spreads around the building, probably towards the perimeter and then finding its way towards the interior, typically into the return system. From there it goes back in, starts getting added to the outside air, goes back to the air handling unit across the coil and blows out to become conditioned air again. So, just gonna, revisiting these issues in order for us to be able to talk a little bit more about how we start sizing them.

And either I'm gonna have to lower the ceiling, or I'm gonna have to make the entire building taller, and I just don't want to do either of those things most of the time. Now every once in a while, you have to. And it is what it is, you deal with it.

One of the things that they're very likely to ask you in some way, is to have a floor plan, and that big floor plan has a section going through it, and there's going to be some ductwork making its way around, doing whatever it's going to do, and the part where you happen to cross it in the section, let's say that piece of duct work is 18 by 18, and so you're going to say, oh I have to make sure that I can fit an 18 by 18 in here. But what if turns out that this portion right here is actually 24 by 24, or 24 by 36, something like that. So it's bigger than the portion that happens to be in our section cut.

But instead of having that return duct get ducted to each of those different spaces, we're just gonna have it open to the plenum. So it's just gonna be open to the space above the ceiling. And then we're gonna have an opening that'll look just like one of the diffusers in the ceiling.

So we take that barrel of water and we make a loop out of it and water will come from the barrel and go somewhere where it's going to be able to reject its heat to the outside. So that would be the heat rejection loop. So, so far we have two loops.

And there's a couple of different ways we can kind of imagine this working but let's just sort of do a simple version where we're gonna take it up through the building and I'm gonna say, alright. At each floor I'm gonna have an air-handling unit. I'm gonna put a coil, add a coil at each of those.

We've got a little fan, we've got a little coil, and then we're gonna have water, chilled water coming up and going to each of those, and coming back. So we have the whole chilled water loop. But instead of going to those single big air handling units, we have these much smaller individual room-size different versions here.

The chiller example has a great big set of elements in the basement, so I have to have a clear, logical mechanical room where it's very protected, it has a two-hour fire rating from any part of the rest of the building, I've got, you know, a sort of centralized control; in this scenario we're saying, yeah, it's not about centralized control, this is not like a university or something that really wants to have, like, you know, there's one person in charge, they know the system, they work with the system; like, this is gonna be maybe 10 different systems for 10 different tenants, the tenants are on their own and that's probably fine with the tenant, that there's not like some bureaucracy or some other person you gotta call to get 'em to come in to do something, like it's right there in your unit; so there's a bunch of advantages, but obviously a bunch of disadvantages. Trying to find the right kind of layout can be a little tricky, make sure that something can be that flexible and work for everybody, even if it sounds logical, like we're just gonna put the cooling tower on the roof, but, you know, that can be tricky, right? Like where does it go, where are the pipes?

I could, instead of having one central system, I might just put, say, five, six, different rooftop units on and just spread them out through the space and I just blow in air and pull air back from, sort of, near that area and it's very, you know, I only need a little bit of duct work in order to deal with these great big buildings. I'm mostly just kind of blowing that air in from the roof area and letting it kinda settle down into the space. So in the right situation this could be very cost-effective.

So, the supply duct is going down, the return duct is coming right back, the fresh air is adding in, and then this little zone over here is where we're trying to get that outside air to sort of blow through and so we've got a little zone here to encourage evaporation and loss of the heat in order to get rid of the heat out to the outside space. So, this little single system has all of those different little components built right into it and that funny shape is about protecting that outside air intake from any rain or anything along those lines. You'll sometimes see they'll have a little baffle system down at the bottom here in order to help stop if you get rain kind of bouncing down and coming up in, so, they're really set up as in a way to be very compact and efficient, you wanna them as small as possible so you can crane them easily, you wanna be able to get the air in the one side and then this other side, it's less worrying about whether any moisture gets in there 'cause you really, it's not really connected with any of the air that's gonna make its way down into the building.

At some point you can stop doing that, you're just adding the numbers of CFM, but now we're looking at the total CFM for that larger branch, and going through the same sort of estimate looking back, checking the pressure, seeing if the CFM works, and then the scale of the duct that the ductulator tells us, whether it's an online one or one of the cardboard ones. Then we're going to do it again as we go back and have a larger trunk, or a larger branch, back towards the air handling unit. We're just going to keep checking as we add up each of these different areas, and every branch that has multiple zones on it, you would have to add up all of the zones and sort of making sure that you have the ability to get enough air through that system that it can actually get all the way out into the space.

And it's gonna sort of leak out at the end at the diffuser. That's just not logical or really helping us very much. Or we could do a little, how 'bout three inch by three inch duct?

So if I want to change the temperature of a room, and I wanna bring the temperature down, I'm gonna send in more cold air that's in my duct into that room. I'm going to vary the amount of air that's gonna go into that space because the air is cooler than the room temperature air. And so, I'm gonna bring more cool air into the space, it's gonna mix around, it's gonna bring down that temperature, and then when the temperature is right, I'll stop bringing air in at the same pace.

So, we're gonna be understanding how many fixtures, how many toilets, how many sinks, how many whatever, kitchen sinks, utility sinks, drinking fountains, all of those things would be listed in the code, so you're gonna look up for that use, and you're gonna figure out how many toilets, for example, per number of people you'll need. So it might say you need one for every 25 people, or it might say you need one for every 100 people, or it might say you need four for the first 100 and then one per every 100 after that, something along those lines. There'll be some system that they come up with for sort of judging how many toilets need to go for a certain number of people.

For our purposes here, we're just gonna say there's something that's making hot water and we're gonna have both hot and cold water moving through our space. And then when I get up to any particular floor, I'm gonna have a branch that's gonna come off of the main riser, and that branch is then going to reach up and give us a spot for a toilet, say, and maybe one for a sink, a lavatory sink. But that lavatory sink isn't gonna only have cold water.

Well, does it make sense to have fewer holes through the roof and do whatever it is you have to do in order to get that vent pipe over to those other vent pipes, or does it just make sense to go up individually and go right through the roof with it's own enlarger and it's own access to that outside air. There is no right answer. It's one of those things that you are bouncing sort of the logic of the constructability with trying to maintain your design vision.

Cuz it'll be very difficult for people to understand what they need to know in order to be a code official or to be a plumber trying to put a price on it or whatever it happens to be unless we draw it in this sort of more complicated way. So these days that might be a version of just taking it out of a three D model, and then finding a way to sort of simplify the drawing enough that it's readable and easy. I can still put the sizing on it without it being too confusing.

When I have a water closet, I need enough water that's gonna fill the tank, or if it's flush valve, it's a little different, but let's just say a simple one is filling a tank, so it just used to have some water, enough water pressure that it'll fill a tank reasonably quickly, you know, it's a little over a gallon, so it takes a second, so you want to go reasonably fast, so I want a big enough and pressure enough pipe that it'll fill that tank up, but it doesn't have to be an enormous pipe, right, it's just filling a tank. But the waste pipe is gonna be pretty big, because, like I said, people put all kinds of things down those toilets. So I'm gonna have at least a three-inch pipe, possibly a four-inch pipe every time I go out.

So when you do that, obviously, you have a little bit more than you need in the very beginning, but over a span of time, as lights get used, and they go out in different rates because may get used more than others or just some are worse than others, and they fail faster or something like that, over a span of time, that lighting level will drop down a little bit, and what you want it to do is drop down to a point where it's actually reasonable and giving us the correct amount of light on the work plane. So you have all these very physical things which are relatively easy to quantify, scale of the room, height of the room, texture on the wall, glossy versus matte, that kind of thing. Where the light fixture actually is.

But let's just imagine that we have a light that's right there, maybe it's on some sort of system, and it's sitting exactly right where we're talking about, and it's producing light directly onto the task. Well that's obviously called a task light. Important thing to remember though is anytime a light is directly answering a task, it would be referred to as a task light.

When we're talking about lighting design and we're trying to figure out exactly how many light fixtures we need, how many luminaires we need in every space, we're using anything like zonal cavity method as one example. Like I said, there's a number of other ways to do this. But, we're first thing gonna do, number one, we're gonna establish what our work plane is and we're gonna establish the number of foot candles.

What we need for a fire is heat, oxygen, and a spark and fuel, and so if you can take one of those away, you're going to take the fire away, and so most of the time, the sprinkler is about taking the heat away or reducing it in order to reduce the capacity of the fire itself, but sometimes, if it's small enough, it will actually put the fire out, but you need to have that water going at a general level everywhere in order to make sure that wherever that fire is, the heat there will be taken out. So that's clearly the big thing is trying to put the fire out or slow it down, at least, in order to get it to be a small enough entity that when the firefighters come, they can handle it more readily. The other architectural aspect to this that you're going to get is that it will impact our egress distances.

Then when the firefighters were looking at that information at the annunciator panel and this one was the one that was going off because there was a fire there, say and the water's coming out of that particular head and maybe the one next to it, then that would tell them: Well, okay. It's in this wing, it's on this floor, it would give quite a bit of information. So, the layout of the pipes is not always about efficiency.

And it's going to just be an empty pipe that a firefighter in an emergency could pull their truck up, they could connect to a hose from a fire hydrant to this standpipe right outside the building, right near the front door. They connect those together so that now that pipe is now pressurized from the fire hydrant, or possibly a pumper truck, but it's pressurized now and filling with water. And then the firefighters can run into the building, run up the stairs after they've figured out where the fire is.

The circuit breaker going, well the whole thing of that is just saying that I have too much power going through, and it's potentially gonna be heating up those wires too much, and so if I have too much power going through, and its gonna heat up those wires, somewhere in the building, those wires are gonna melt, and I don't want that to happen somewhere in the building, so I use a circuit breaker as a place that's sort of the weak link, if you will. And when that heats up and it disconnects, it allows us the opportunity to turn off whatever it is the offending problem. You kind of fix the situation.

And then what that's going to do, is it's going to stop them, if you imagine I have a very tall thin insection open web steel joist, and when I start putting a load on here, through the roof load or floor load or whatever it is, there's sort of this opportunity for this thing to start bowing out all by itself. Just like we talked about it from the column standpoint. And the great thing about the open web steel joist, is that they are very light.

And, like we said earlier, when we talk about the idea of shape, we talk about how much span something has, we're also going to be very interested in the idea of bracing, because that's where we're really saying, this is not just a material out in the world, by itself. We're now saying it's part of an overall system, and when we put it into an overall system, there's a lot more things going on than just a beam or just a column, just the material, and just the shape. We're now connecting it into the world of this particular building, and so bracing also becomes a key element of the discussion.

It's gonna make a big difference in terms of how much deflection we're going to end up getting. And again, that makes perfect sense. You make that span longer, that's gonna give us more deflection.

So by thinking of this, the advantage of doing something that's a continuous beam in this scenario, is that I'm actually, instead of having just that simple sag that the simple beam is going to do, which means that the entire length is then part of that sort of question of where it's going to start sagging and where that deflection is really going to come from. In this one, this part is bending upward from there to there. So that's bending upward, it's not sagging down.

But remember, in general, you're going from decking, decking in spanning from joist to joist, joists are spanning from beam to beam, the beams are spanning from girder to girder, or column to column, and then the girders are spanning from either column to column or bearing wall to bearing wall. So it's in that order. Do I always have all of them?

The gist of what we're talking about right now, is just that these ideas, the moment and the pinned connections, those are sort of used over and over again, as ways to think about how we're gonna have the whole thing, sort of react together. Sometimes I want to have the moment connections, for example in this example, where I'm gonna have it be all moment connections. But it might be that I just have a few moment connections in certain locations, where it's really important to hold the strength of the building.

So, hot rolled steel, it's being used as a column element, as a vertical element, generally is gonna be more compact, it's gonna be more square, and it's trying to be sort of reasonably sturdy in both directions, and it's probably gonna be braced in one direction that's gonna help it out to kind of give it that sort of solidity in that way. So you can usually tell, if you look at a piece of steel before it's being installed, you can look at it and say, well, does it have a lot of depth and is relatively light? Well, that's probably a beam.

So always under sort of a gun here is, "How do I make it work, i.e., flow into the formwork and kind of fill all the gaps and not leave air pockets so it's gonna flow enough but not so much that I'm gonna end up making this concrete too weak and it's just not gonna be doing the job that it needs to be able to do?" So, I'm very nervous always about that ratio between the water and the Portland cement. And we understand that through slump tests and cylinder tests and things like that. And we've talked about those before, so, if you're looking for more information on slump and cylinder tests, you can look in the exam 4 section.

The flat-slab is gonna be one where I have a drop panel, so that's where I have that little extra drop panel between the column and the slab and what that's doing is it's just giving me a little more area to be able to get that rebar to be able to get up and out into that slab. And so I can get a little more capacity because I've just increased that zone of all that action that's going on there with so much reinforcing going right on through as well as bending and going into the slab so there's a drop panel or it could actually be something where I have a drop panel and then an actual, Y-shape to the top of the column. And that gives me even more advantage in terms of getting out the rebar to sort of spread the distance.

So I have this bunch of rebar, and it's in this concrete and we put a big load on it and it's handling all that tension, but there's also this desire of that rebar to buckle all by itself, even without thinking of the overall column with all the concrete, so if these are near the exterior, there's not that much concrete to hold it in place, and so if I have a big load on that and it's starting to sort of push to the side, it's putting that steel into tension, if I have a big load on this column and I'm pushing down on it, whether it's in compression or in tension, there's a chance that that reinforcing bar is gonna wanna just buckle on out so one of the ways that we deal with that from a reinforcing standpoint is we do a kind of wrap, and I'm gonna show on this one a continuous spiral wrap, and that's just gonna literally go right all around, all the way down, and then it would wrap around by, eventually getting down, et cetera, et cetera, and what that spiral is gonna do is it's gonna help hold in that rebar from wanting to buckle towards the outside. It's gonna give that concrete, that wrapping around it, just a little bit of help, to help keep that rebar from wanting to bust out of the concrete, and then we would, in this round situation, we would have some sort of form work, maybe a Sonotube, something like that, that we'd place over this and we'd fill the whole thing with concrete after we placed this rebar cage in there. Do we always do it with a continuous spiral system?

So the answer to that is, instead of trying to deal with that in the connection itself, because it's just not gonna work, you're just not gonna make these things have a moment connection, a really stiff strong connection. So instead of doing that what we're gonna do is we're gonna put a piece of plywood, maybe... So I'm showing this at 24 inches on center.

And don't want there to be a big distance off because that means I'm putting a lot of load on to that single two by member that's that single top plate, and it's going to start to sag down, it's going to be hard to get those to line up. If I have a double top plate, now, I have three inches of wood, I can have a lot of flexibility. That's a big amount of wood, a big chunk of wood there to be able to transfer that load over to the stud.

So again, when we're talking about the structure of this system, we're also talking about things like cabinets, and light fixtures, and we have to foresee all of those issues and make sure that they're accommodated in the way that we've laid out the actual structure.

That's something that will help stop moisture from penetrating up from the concrete into the wood, but you're also going to use in that sill plate location, either a particular type of wood, a particular species of wood like cedar, or redwood, or something like that that can withstand the moisture naturally. Or you're going to make that sill plate a piece of treated wood so that it's something that can deal with getting a little bit of moisture up from that concrete. Everything else, you would not want to use as treated.

That different version is I'm gonna take decking material, which is three inches thick, and it's tongue-and-groove, and it's often made out of three different pieces of wood. Not always, sometimes it's actually sort of carved out of one solid piece, but often it's made out of three different pieces of wood, and that makes it easier to make that tongue-and-groove. And then that allows us to just have this wood decking.

The concept here, the split ring connector, remember the whole point here is you're trying to get the two pieces of wood to be held together. And so instead of doing it through the bolt, you're actually doing it through this shared split ring, so they're both dealing with that split ring and the bolt is just holding them together. Just holding so that it has to deal with a split ring.

Imagine we have a couple different lines of brick that we've sort of put together. When we look at these in section and we start to see that we've got bricks all lined up there, well that would be a wythe. A wythe of brick.

Maybe it's not particularly exposed, or maybe it's just more important that it's all structurally tied together, or it's just not in a place that gets a lot of rain, maybe, something, there's lots of reasons why having the barrier wall system might be plenty, but in most of the cases these days, not all the cases, but most of the time, we're gonna find that the cavity wall system is really the one that's gonna make sense, because we do have to worry about water most of the time. We do have to think about how we're gonna kind of stop that water from getting all the way through our structure and start causing havoc on the inside. So, we kind of create this outside veneer as sort of a sacrificial element.

At this base floor, I have the foundation holding it up, but once I get to an upper floor, that's going to be a steel angle that's going to be sitting in there, and those bricks are going to be sitting right on top of that. And I'm going to have the exact same thing happening with my flashing to get that water out at the base of that element. So there's going to be a new base at each floor level.

It's gonna get moisture into the wall at an excessive rate, and you're going to have lots and lots of issues, not just from the moisture but from the fact that it's freezing and thawing and spalling the brick and doing all kinds of other problems, so you're always looking at that tool joint while you're thinking about the bond and the structural system of it because you can't let these things just start falling apart. The other think that's worth noting, again this is talked about elsewhere, but the idea of when these bricks start getting soaked and the mortar starts getting soaked and filled with water, these things are made of actual materials. The clays have minerals in them.

And equally if I imagine, a big wall going up, I can put an opening in that wall and kind of just like what we talked about over here, I can use a steel angle or something like that to hold up these elements that are over the actual opening. Maybe I, if it's a bigger opening and it's kind of chunkier CMU wall, it might not be a little tiny steel angle, I might use a wide flange or something. But I can hold it up in very much the same way.

As I've said before, the concrete, in fact, will have some tension capacity, but we discount it completely because it's just easier to say all right, we're just gonna count this one area and think of that as our sort of way of dealing with the compressive quality, and we're just gonna think of solely this steel, 'cause we're just gonna say that's gonna be easier to think about that then try to get all the little nuances of how a little bit more of the compression can come from a little bit of this part of the concrete and a little bit from that part of the steel can do it. There's no reason to be that detailed about it, it's actually just gonna cause problems if you do, because you just don't know for sure exactly what the tensile capacity of that concrete would be, and it just doesn't make sense to try to add it in. So, this stuff gets simplified down in order to sort of make a logical way of putting these calculations together.

They'd line it up well enough, they'd get it leveled out, they'd get it all worked out so it's kind of holding itself up and kinda being maneuvered, and then once they have that leveled and in place, they'd put a couple more bolts in that are gonna hold it tight in that spot and then in this moment connection example, they're then gonna hold it tight enough that they can start to do all the welding, add some more bolts to hold it while it's being welded, but essentially you are working your way to getting it to be solid and then welding it in place. In the pinned connection example we'll look at, you would probably just keep tightening it back and forth, back and forth, so you're making sure that's it getting level and you're tightening it up, but it always still has a little bit of ability to move. Tiny, but a little bit of ability to move until you finally get those last little bit of torque on those bolts to hold it really steady in place.

So okay, this was an example where we went from being just a simple sheer connection from beam to girder, and then we made it more of a continuous one. Obviously we could also do it continuous. Let's try a 3-D view here.

It's not that different than just a regular corrugated deck, so there are certain times when I would use it, and then most of the time, we're just gonna use a regular corrugated deck or a regular composite system for this as a process, so the form deck means that I'm not really counting as the concrete and the steel decking. I'm not really putting them together. I'm just using the steel decking to form the concrete, and then either the steel decking itself without the concrete is the structural calculation, or the concrete without the steel decking is the structural calculation in terms of what the overall loading capacity of this thing is, and there's plenty of times when that makes perfect sense, and then composite deck is where we're saying, "Okay, we're putting these together." It's a composite.

So, you're going to see that range, like I said, I think it technically goes down to like 8 gage, but I've never seen 8 gage. It probably goes up to 27 or something maybe even a little more than that. But, the typical range is going to be in that kind of 14 to kind of 20 range.

Well that basement sure looks like a void to that water, so it's gonna find its way right to that wall, and then just burrow right through the wall because of the pressure differences, just gonna be a force that's gonna push it right through your structure. So what do we do there? Well, same thing we did below.

If I think of the beam, and it's got this little leg on it, so when I have a shape like this, you can imagine that I might have something like, say, a double T on here, and that double T is gonna have that sort of slab top. I'm just gonna cut it in section here. You can have those little Ts that are coming down, and then those things are gonna go, and they're gonna bear right on that little ledge.

So typically when we're talking about a structural wall that's been made out of masonry, we're probably talking about a CMU wall, and that CMU wall is probably running bond, and it's probably loaded with rebar every other cavity, and that cavity is then filled with grout so it grouts solid and it essentially becomes a concrete wall. We have the rebar going vertically, we have the truss type or ladder type or some sort of horizontal or reinforcing going horizontally. It doesn't have to be that, there's a lot of other ways.

The control joint is really there just to control cracks because you know the cracks are gonna come because of the various kinds of movement, and so you just want to have it be done in a way that's gonna control it, put them in a place where you can be careful about how much moisture is gonna be able to get into those cracks but also so that they are visually appealing, so given that, you're gonna end up with many more control joints than you are expansion joints. Like I said, expansion joints are sort of problematic. It's hard to deal with all the insulation and lack of continuity that comes from them, but those two things are gonna be an important part of thinking about any masonry and, as I said, also, any concrete structural wall.

And so it's gonna be just a little spot there that's gonna allow air that's been warmed up to find its way up and out of that roof setup. So we have a hole down at the bottom, we have a hole up at the top, they're both protected, so you're not getting moisture in but it's gonna allow air to blow right through and on and up and that's gonna keep that whole element all at the same temperature roughly. Won't be exactly the same temperature but pretty close.

If you imagine the sort of heat that's kind of beating down on the, you know, sun beating down on this roof as the asphalt, shingles, or whatever kind of roofing it is gets hotter and hotter and hotter, it's eventually sending some of that heat through the roof structure and into the space. If I can have this little gap of air in between then as the air in that space warms up, it's just gonna warm up and rise and take itself right out. So, it's effectively taking some of that heat before it has a chance to impact the inside of my space, it's taking that heat right up and out and away and so it's protecting the building in the summer as well.

So I get this sense of the vault it's not actually the same amount of vault as the rafter version, but it feels like a vault, but it's actually still technically a truss. And then I have a little bearing spot and I have my wall and there we go. And we just sort of build it away and all the same issues apply.

So, that's sort of a simple, straightforward idea, just a 2x12, but it can only span 14, 16 feet, something like that, depends on the species, depends on a few other factors. You might, if you had really good species, and some other issues, sort of aligned, you might be able to get it to span a little bit farther than that, but you're really not going to be able to get 20 feet, or 22, or 24 feet out of just a standard 2x12. And, it's just too far for that kind of thing, and it'll have too much give and bounce, it wouldn't feel comfortable.

So, while this might be the answer in some locations where we're not worried so much about insulation, in other locations that's just not gonna make any sense. So, in those locations, maybe we do something like, where we leave a gap inside, and so the structural capacity gets handled by the two 2x8s, and then we put, we infill the rest of it, with rigid insulation. So that you still have some cold bridge, you still have a lot more wood there than you would otherwise, of course you do, 'cause it's gotta do the structural duty that the header has to do, it has to span that whole opening, but a big chunk of it is actually set up as insulation.

Okay and whether you're using stress skin panels or purlins or whatever system you're gonna use to make a finishing system for a timber system. A couple of important things to remember. Whenever I have big amounts of wood, so this is like a eight by eight column, or an eight by 12 beam, something like that.

Well, if I'm gonna have something like that, either this element needs to be very robust, which we've drawn it pretty darn robust there, or there's gonna have to be some sort of way to pull that thing tight through, and there's gonna be a very big embankment someplace that I can bury this structure into, so that I can have a place where I can crank that structure down to pull it tighter and tighter in order that that fabric that's gonna be stretched across there can always be brought to as tight as possible. So that when we talk about something like a tensile structure, there has to be something that it's pulling against. It can't be that it's just sort of floating up in the sky.

Okay, so a classic wall, simple wall, we have some drywall, maybe we have a stud wall, it's metal stud, maybe it's wood stud, some more drywall on the other side, and maybe you put a little bit of sound batt insulation in there so we've got just a little bit of that in there, and we have our floor structure going by. From a sound attenuation stand point, the ability of sound to transmit from one side to the other, putting a little bit of insulation in there is gonna help, but it's not gonna help that much. This is gonna be a pretty terrible wall, generally.

The reason that that's set up in this particular way is that it's really focused on the human voice because that's what we as architects care about so, it's not saying if I have a higher STC rating that's gonna be much better from a sound transmission standpoint but it's not necessarily saying that it's gonna be better at all frequencies. It's just saying at the human voice level it's gonna be better than the previous one. It's possible that I could have a higher STC rating and have more sound at some frequencies transmitting from one side to the other than another STC rating wall that has a lower STC rating.

So, the drywall gets attached just to the resilient channel, and the resilient channel gets attached to the stud and that way they have that little bit of vibration that's available in there. This is one of those ways, that idea, the resilient channel along with all those other issues about the gap size, the solidity of the material, trying to plug all the holes, making sure you're not lining up the outlets, switches, things like that, the other issues like undercuts on doors, all of those things, it's a whole bunch of issues that you're gonna be working with in order to stop the sound transmitting from one side to another. Like I said before, the only real way to do this is to actually have these be two completely separate structures.

But if I'm in a larger conference room or some other kind of larger setting and I have a big glass wall, that sound is going to go a longer distance from the speaker bounce off that glass in that sort of harsh way, straight forward bounce way, it's gonna bounce and come all the way back and your gonna have a much longer time because sound takes longer to go farther distance obviously. And so I'm gonna have more time at which point I'm gonna hear the sound the first time it went by. Imagine you're sitting here kind of sitting in a chair listening to somebody talking.

And in that case, you're gonna have something like, so here's our corridor, the arrow, and it's gonna say "Exit." And that arrow's gonna tell us which direction we need to go in, so part of what you're doing as an architect, is you're looking through the plans and trying to understand what do people need to know in order to find an exit in an emergency. And it's a really important idea to remember that people are panicked in these situations. The whole point of the exit signs isn't that you will never use them.

The just single horn alarm systems have the ability to sort of cover very large areas, but if you can't hear, you need to have those strobe lights, and those strobe lights need to be someplace where you would be able to actually pick it up. So, most of the time, when we're talking about alarm systems, we're talking about having some centralized sensor-based system that is going to say, "There's something going wrong. "We need to alarm and tell everybody about it." So there's a way that the smoke detectors and other sort of systems of sensors will detect that there's a problem, they'll send that information to a centralized system.

Just know that if it's not an area of refuge in a larger space where it's relatively easy to manoevre you have to kind of rethink those numbers in order to have it make sense. So one was the niche going straight in and the other one would be a niche that you're parallel parking in. If you kind of imagine being in a wheelchair and kind of parallel parking in and then pulling forward, like you would with a car, well actually you need a little bit more than the 48 inches in order to be able to do that.

Plus, really you're gonna walk up a five, six, seven, 80 floors, of course you're gonna need to have elevators just from a convenience standpoint for getting people in and out of any building that's larger than just one or two stories. We're also gonna have freight elevators in buildings. So, just getting materials from one level to another, bringing in furniture, replacing equipment, anything like that.

The LULA is a bit more complicated, a little bit more robust, it's likely to be three stops, it's likely to have a distance of about maybe up to about 20 possibly a little higher than 20 feet of total travel distance range, so it's gonna go a little farther, it's gonna have a little bit more capacity, it's more like getting into a little cab like a regular elevator, but it's limited in the distance it'll go, and it's limited in how many people it can carry, and it's limited in its expectation and use, and so it's not a very robust system. But, for the right situation, when you really need to have accessibility or to be able to get materials from one level to another, the lifts and the LULAs can really make a lot of sense. In general, you don't need a shaft for either of these.

So that's really the big thing you would need to think about in terms of this particular exam, is how you would have to make sure that that space is allotted, so you can make sure you're not having head-height problems, you're not having flow problems, that everything sort of makes logical sense. And then the last things to say about, obviously, having escalators in place, is they clearly have to be maintained fairly regularly, there's a lot of power involved, so there's a few other little elements. You have to make sure that there are places to get to the machinery, there's an ability to have access panels, this is gonna be showing up a great deal on the mechanical plans, 'cause there's a lot of electrical that's gonna be needed for these, and a lot of other sort of power aspects, so they intertwine with our other systems quite dramatically, but mostly it's about keeping the people flowing through, and keeping them able to be maintained.

And so if there's a high pressure on the outside and a low pressure on the inside, it's just gonna push, that difference is just gonna push that moisture right through the wall. But when I have this sort of rain screen element it's essentially, effectively a pressure equalization chamber. What that's doing is it's creating a middle zone of pressure so that instead of having the full pressure difference from the outside to the inside I now have this internal middle ground space.

It's shedding the water so it's battling against the gravity, it's protecting the nail, but it's also allowing that movement when that moisture gets into that wood and it expands that piece of wood it will allow that little bit of movement, one next to the other, but then equally just like we were talking about before if that's going right over that joint between the regular part of the wall and where the floor is coming in that movement that's happening because of those rim joists and the top plates and all of those elements, there's gonna be a squishing and then an enlarging. It's going to allow that to sort of slide right by each other. So the shape of the clapboard, shape of the shingles, the shape of all of those kinds of siding materials, you'll find there's always some way that that slippage is allowed to happen and yet still protecting the slot in between.

So again you're thinking of these things in plan, you think okay it's just a bunch of small conduits, and then up in the ceiling it's just a bunch of small conduits, but the relationship from that wall to that ceiling element is going to be much more sort of full and dramatic as it moves through in order to allow for that wire to be pulled. The same thing with the air, same thing with the water in the systems, right, you're always looking what are the actuality of these things so I can make sure that I'm making these shafts in a way that's sort of reasonable and safe. Our biggest concern is going to be fire stopping, second thing is going to be about the movement, about how these things are going because you don't want the fire stopping to be stopped, to be bothered by the fact that there's different movement on different floors, and then the next thing is just making sure that we're really fitting everything in given the fact that everything is sort of moving in these sort of awkward ways.

Well, understanding where that is in terms of how that's going to impact the wall design, as well as how it's going to impact the ceiling design in terms of keeping that air flowing, and interacting with the other flows of air in terms of the supply air and the return air, all of that as one system, again, you're integrating lots of different ideas into this one little moment of integration of just ceilings and walls.

So we're trying to make sure that we have a logical process for how we're gonna talk about it and not only are we having that logical process for how we're talking about it, but it's clear what the logical process is for how we're gonna lay it out and if we can have as much of a logical process for laying it out, it will still be confusion, it will still be complicated, it will still be all kinds of flexible ducts snaking their way around and through structural systems and all that will still happen but if the sort of overall idea is straightforward and understandable and everybody can plug into it, it will be happening. That chaos will happen in a way that is more defined and more readily flexible for future uses. So, the big deal with coordination, it's all about having a system and it's all about relying on that system to communicate with all the different players and stakeholders so that everybody knows what they're supposed to do.

So we're pushing air to the outside and letting the air come back to the inside for a return, but we never have the trunk line of the return and the trunk line of the supply cross each other. In this case, we have a couple of spots where we have little branch ends that cross the trunk lines, but that's probably not a big deal. And if it was, well then we would just stop the return farther back and find a way to have the trunk lines stop at a different location.

And so I'm putting it over by this glass element and it feels very sort of conscious and reasonable but maybe I don't wanna have that everywhere like that, maybe some of the elements, some of the offices wanna have a more refined quality to them. So how can I think of this systematically and have that system be helpful in this breaking down of some places are big and industrial and open, and other places are a little more refined? Well, what if we started to think about this sectionally and we brought this up of our same system.

Second thing is are these funny spots where there's a system or something that's been set up in such a way that it's just gonna let sound move very, very easily from one unit to the other and if there is, then we have to kind of decide is that something that we can really deal with or not by changing the system around. Then the next level of approach is really the sort of physicality of the structure itself. You know, what do we want to do about that.

So you want to be actively seeking multiple stakeholders, who is it that can give you really good information, you don't want to be putting the blinders on just to get the work done, you want to be looking for who needs to be part of that discussion, sometimes it might be a funder or somebody like that, that needs to say, look I know you're thinking this, but in fact we need to see it this way because that's important for how our bank will approve or disapprove a process. If you haven't asked that question, they won't tell you that information and so you just don't know and there you are trying to submit the information and the bank won't approve it because it wasn't done the way that they wanted it done. So in terms of the system for design concepts, for the system for understanding how you're gonna move forward, and keep the designs on track, right you're always looking for all the people that need to have some input be able to give their input, so what's the system for that?

So it's a big difference between design drawings and construction drawings, poche is just one example, but that's the way you have to start thinking about this. There's a line in the sand moving along through schematic design, design development. After design development, everything stops being design drawings and becomes construction drawings.

There's actually a movement that's happening where architects are, instead of doing the normal run of drawings that explain from a contractual standpoint what's being suggested, they're actually just saying all right, we'll do the model and then we'll hand the model over to you. And then you can build it. And so whoever's building it does some part of the model, and the people who are doing the initial design so some part of the model and somewhere in between all the decisions get made.

And so they have a different set of issues, and so I would be aiming those sets of drawings, that package of drawings, towards them and their needs, so that they can really produce the information they needed and then eventually produce a building from it. So thinking of it as a package aimed at somebody is sometimes a very useful thing. Some other examples might be for the funders.

And then, before you get to the architectural drawings, the A zero, that first one is an architectural drawing, but before you get to the rest of the architectural drawings there's gonna be a whole bunch of other stuff that goes first. That would include civil, landscaping, sometimes demo drawings. Demo drawings are actually architectural drawings but they're sort of a specific part of the architectural drawings.

So the floor plans are gonna give us sort of the big idea about how things are organized and then the elevations are gonna give us the sort of big idea of what the sort of general concept of the look of something is and then once we have those things sort of nailed down now we're gonna get into sections and the sections are there to give us a sort of overall vertical set of relationships. So is this a building that has a bunch of individual layers? Is it a building where we have an atrium in it?

And that's where I'm kind of making my own set of decisions, because I think, "well, alright, in this situation, "it actually makes sense to put "that information in a different location." But if you imagine a bigger project, in a sort or bigger-scale element, where I've got big floor plans, and lots of doors, and lots of windows, and lots of pieces of equipment, and all of these different elements that have to be listed and controlled, and all the information, sort of, put together in a, sort of, logical, straightforward way, in those situations, these much bigger, like, just kind of imagine a 12 million dollar high school, or something like that, that's being done. There's a whole team of people who are there just to organize the information, so you have somebody from the architect's office, you have somebody from the GC, the supervisor, or somebody who's related to the supervisor, you might even have somebody from the client's office, the clerk of the works, somebody, that's one of my favorite terms, "clerk of the works," that those three people would have some set of understandings about who is, sort of, controlling all of that information. When they're doing pricing, there's a whole, there's a person who's literally just focused on a project that scale, this is one person's entire time, is set just making sure all the right information is in the right people's hands.

This is drawing number one, and it probably does something like, basement plan, then it's gonna say scale, what the scale is, then you're gonna have down below that somewhere your graphic scale, and then at some point, either within the drawing or on this element itself, you're going to have some spot where you say, oh, and by the way, that's north. That might be a little graphic-y thing, or it might have some sort of special quality, but it should be very reasonably easy to read so that somebody can look at this and know, alright, straight up, that's north, or you know, maybe that way's north, and so you need to be able to show that in some way so that people can make rational decisions about what kind of screen has to happen on the windows, or whatever kind of information they need to know about how the sun's gonna be moving around, or when somebody says, oh, the northeast corner, they can figure out which side is the northeast corner, so it's a set of information. It's really important to have for each drawing, and part of the reason you have it for each drawing is because occasionally, something needs to get oriented differently for whatever reason.

Now, there's plenty of times when 1/8 inch drawings are gonna be way too big on the sheet to really fit for the scale of the building that we're talking about. And that you just can't make it work. Maybe you have a hospital and its got multiple wings and maybe you've got a university and you wanna have a whole plan of the whole university so you can reference back and forth.

A707 and it's drawing too, so I'm gonna, say that all the information that's happening there, just on that one wall, just where that specific thing is, so I draw it differently. I'm not just pointing at the area, I'm drawing it as a specific zone, a specific element and then I'm going to find a way to connect that to that tag. So I'm using the tags as a way to take these sort of general ideas, these big picture drawings and then say here's more detail, here's more something else that's going on.

And so again, we can have this same kind of conversation over here with these, and maybe this corridor, maybe it's mandated by code for this to be, say, 48 inches, so I'm gonna put something there that's gonna say 48 inches, four foot zero, and then if I really was worried about it, I would say, as I said before, "hold," or "code verify," something along those lines, I would imply what's there and why it's important, but I'm making sure to put that dimension if it's an important dimension to me, and then again these other dimensions, I would pick and choose the ones that are actually the interesting dimensions to hold onto, and make sure that we're actually telling the story that we mean to tell. So another quick example. Imagine we have a wall, with a window in it, little double window, and this is in, maybe a, I don't know.

That tag is gonna then allow you to find that same door in this door schedule and then you can find out, well not only is it a glass door, but it's a 36 inch wide glass door. And that it has, it's the type one, which we can see the image of it right there. And we can find if we read the hardware listings, we can find out exactly how the locks are gonna work.

I'm gonna have a design development process, I'm gonna get to a certain point, we're gonna have a design type drawings, we're gonna get a sign-off with the client, we're gonna take those drawings, we're gonna start moving into contract documents type drawings, there'll be a moment where we're still sort of like design drawings but we've moved into the contract documents, so those are gonna be simplified drawings with probably no poche, and then from there we're gonna move into a more detailed version, now we're getting into a spot where we're working with the engineers and we're coordinating the information back and forth, so now detail information is starting to find its way into the drawings, and then eventually I'm getting to the spot where we now have a really good idea of how everything's laid out, and we can cross-reference from one drawing to the other in a very clear manner. And then, I can get to the spot where we're then coordinating, we're really going through with a fine-comb and looking through all of the specific pieces of information, and making sure that everything coordinates logically together in making whatever changes that we need to make. So then, I can finally use that set to use for coordination, we can take all those elements, we can go back and forth and make sure all that level of specific detail is in there, and that everything is coordinated together and not causing a problem, we have to get to that point so we can finalize the set but we wanna be able to use it at each of those different points along the way.

So as we said under design/bid/build, that sort of standard system that we just talked about right, the design development drawings are gonna be really a conversation between the architect and the client. They're gonna be sort of we took all your information and we've talked about it schematic wise, we've done research, we've done all these different ideas and now we're saying this is the design, this is the place that we're gonna be at. This is what we want the end result to look like.

If you're going to have it in more than one location, it's civil and something else because the civil drawings are often a lot about gathering water, and when you're talking about gathering water on a site, you're really talking about the topography. So, the concept here is that there's a simple clarity of connection between these different types of drawing systems, and ways of communicating, and what their agendas are for. There's certain ways they are similar, but then there's also a bunch of ways where they are individual and that's because of the agendas they each have.

So we're gonna be showing what's growing, we're gonna be showing where the water goes, we're gonna be showing what's already been built, we're gonna be showing what is proposed to be built, we're gonna be showing things that are buildings, we're gonna be showing all the other related accessory elements to the buildings, the planting beds, the fences, the porches, the trellises, all of those things need to be described in some place where you can relate them all together. So it's useful to have a detail that shows how a trellis is gonna be built, but I also need to see where it goes, what it's relationship is to the main building. I need to be able to see where it sits in relationship to the property line.

That would be especially true on more complex situations, where you might say, "We want to do this as a performance spec, oh, and we'll also do prototypes to test out those different ideas," and so you're building in the cost of the performance and the prototype and everybody understands the level of detail that they're getting into, and then there's gonna be other situations where the proprietary is just dead simple, straightforward. This is exactly what you want. You know the prices.

But at some point you also need to jump back and make sure that all of those specifics are really being picked up, about something like the relationship of the topography to these building components. Often, this is the big advantage of doing 3D models, that you start to see in the BIM Models and the other kinds of rendered models you can see those moments. But one of the troubles with those is that often they hide those little elements as well as show them by not making them clearly jump out, in terms of the color rendering or something like that, that you can feel like you've looked at it, but not really noticed it.

So you're trying to keep the details to a sort of reasonable number because you want there to be enough information that people can understand what your design intent is really all about. But not so much that you're potentially creating trip hazards for yourself down the road when something starts to change. And inevitably things will start to change.

If you didn't have that detail, it probably wouldn't show up anywhere, so in the exterior, you're going to be showing these ideas of the relationships of these material choices and how they relate to the structure, as well as, like we said, it's all about keeping the water out. Well, the other thing about an exterior detail is it's also all about protecting the inside, so what's the insulated box? How does this particular system relate to that idea of protecting the interior of a space from the exterior weather conditions?

And we're showing a sort of complicated handrail element, and we're showing exactly how that's been put in and how it has multiple points of connection, and that those points of connection have to go through not just the drywall, but get into the actual wood stud. We might even show it as a bolt through in order to really make sure that thing is very strong. We're gonna have this finish floor.

So the relationship to the structure, how you're gonna keep the water out, what the finishes are in relationship to this window system, what specific aspects of the window you're sort of rolling with in terms of is it set close to the exterior, is it set close to the interior. Do I have a big sill, do I have a very little sill, because I'm setting it more on the interior. All of those kinds of issues show up here which are gonna have a pretty dramatic impact on the look of the building.

The code officials would want to know about what's going on with the exterior wall, but they're not going to have the same level of interest for those kinds of details as they would for the stair details. There's a lot of things that happen in the stair, and they're all code related. So all of the ADA issues end up showing up in the stair.

But most of the country these days is worried about flooding, so when we talk about details, we talk about the communication systems for the civil drawings, what we're really focused on is partly those very specific sets of issues so that contractors know what to build and know what to price and so that's clearly part of the discussion, but the other thing that's happening with the civil drawings is that there's a very important conversation happening between the civil engineers and the architect presumably to the code officials so that there's a discussion and an understanding and eventually an agreement that the amount of water that's being pushed into an infrastructure system is okay, the way, the manner that that's being pushed to the infrastructure is okay, or conversely, the way that it's being gathered and sent to the water table on site in situ is functional and likely to work and not sent into the infrastructural system. That's a conversation that code officials really want to have. Similar to when we were talking about stairwells, or something.

You're gonna have a series of office standards that are going to sort of run the way that you put the information together. And then you might alter that for a specific project, because within each project there are sometimes certain systems that will sort of make sense, will help explain that particular situation a little bit better, a little more easily. So you don't need to stick to an office standard if it's not helpful, if it's not being clear, if it's not helping the process of getting something across.

Or maybe it's a construction manager situation and the construction manager is working for the owner, but they're kind of in on the conversation of the design and they're doing pricing and they're trying out different pricing scenarios while you're trying out different design ideas. There may be a sort of fluidity to the conversation back and forth that's not really about a strict legal understanding, but it's about getting ideas across and that would fit to that situation, but it wouldn't necessarily fit once it leaps from there into a bid situation. So, it's just a note here to say when we talk about clarity and readability in drawings, in the context of the exam, make sure that you're thinking about what the context of the question is to really understand what the expectation is.

As we get into design development, we're gonna be reviewing back to, again, the code issues that we did in the very beginning, but then additional information that's come up through the process. As we've learned more, we've been adding to our code review. As we get to the end of the design development phase, we're gonna have not only all of those initial program information and code information, but we're gonna have all the meeting minutes that have come with the meetings with the clients, the meeting minutes that have come from the discussions with the various consultants.

You're just finding a way to systematize the communication process and that's gonna make the communication better, but it's also gonna make the tracking of the communication better, which is at least as important, so that you have the ability to follow along on all the different changes that have been made and that you might be doing that, not during the process, but it potentially could be two, three years later if there's some litigation or some other problem. So you're thinking of the communication and the tracking of these changes in two different lights. One of them, how do we make this the best process possible for all the people who are in the middle of it?

Or maybe it's a construction manager situation and the construction manager is working for the owner, but they're kind of in on the conversation of the design and they're doing pricing and they're trying out different pricing scenarios while you're trying out different design ideas. There may be a sort of fluidity to the conversation back and forth that's not really about a strict legal understanding, but it's about getting ideas across and that would fit to that situation, but it wouldn't necessarily fit once it leaps from there into a bid situation. So, it's just a note here to say when we talk about clarity and readability in drawings, in the context of the exam, make sure that you're thinking about what the context of the question is to really understand what the expectation is.

So when we make a change at that point, so this is now after their contract has been signed, it is no longer an addendum that we're showing those changes on, it's now a change order. Because the change order, is actually a change, what the change is referring to, is a change to the contract. Not to your contract, but a change to their contract.

None of those are going to make a clean, good project that the design process is going to be honored and that the design is gonna get the best out of all the different players. Any one of those choices stopping the project, starting the work but negotiating while you're working, going through the whole work, and then trying to negotiate after the work was done. All right, none of those things are going to create a positive experience for people.

So it's really useful to sort of make sure that you understand the idea of the addendum that's attached with the bidding process, and the change order which is attached to the idea of a contract and then the construction change directive which is sort of like the change order, but kind of pushing it through without having the actual sign-off from all the parties yet.

So it's just a simple way of sort of keeping a number in there, so that you don't accidentally say, alright here's our total budget, and by the way, you're going to add in later the light fixtures. But if you don't put that allowance number in, then the owner is hearing the smaller number, without the light fixtures. And it's sometimes a little tricky to kind of keep in mind, oh I have to remember to add the $15,000 in.

"I understand that we're trying to figure out "whether we can get an amount of money "that's gonna sort of find the right project "to the amount of money that's possible, "but I need to have the pool." Maybe the pool and the enclosure are really important. So, then, the add alt, instead of being the pool and the enclosure as the add alt, maybe that's a portion of the building is considered the add alt. And that becomes a way of sort of defining this down and down and down until you get to a spot where you're confident that at least the main purpose of the building can be understood and found to be for the right price, the right bid, coming from the contractors.

But generally, something like the size of the door you're gonna say, in the door schedule, 36 inches by 80 inches tall by one and three-quarter inch or one and three-eighths inch thick door. Right? And then a door type, a hardware type.

So, you're doing your drawings, you're doing the project manual, you're pulling all this stuff together, you're getting ready to hand it out to a bunch of bidders, and then there's this moment where the project manual and the drawing sets are ending, and you move into the bidding phase, and that's where you're gonna take a certain number of bidders that have been gathered together through whatever means, either you've brought them to the table, or the client has brought them to the able, or some advertisement and they knew to come. Some reason, there's a series of bidders. It's probably at least a couple, probably less than, I don't know, 10, something?

And then, once we're going, well then what do we need to know in order install the information? So we have the tile or the asphalt shingle or whatever it is, so we're getting ready by prepping it, so what did we need to know for that, and then now we're ready to install, what do we need to know for that? How often do the screws need to go in?

That would be especially true on more complex situations, where you might say, "We want to do this as a performance spec, oh, and we'll also do prototypes to test out those different ideas," and so you're building in the cost of the performance and the prototype and everybody understands the level of detail that they're getting into, and then there's gonna be other situations where the proprietary is just dead simple, straightforward. This is exactly what you want. You know the prices.

So, the whole way that your writing a spec typically, now, sometimes you actually do start at the beginning of a section, and just write it out, but typically, the way that you're writing a spec is you're sort of assembling specifications from a number of different sources for all the different potential materials and then, you're going through and getting rid of everything that isn't pertinent to that situation, and the intention in that process, is to make sure that the spec is always relevant, 'cause you don't wanna put a lot of excess material in there, 'cause then, you're just confusing people and it's gonna confuse people legally as well. If y'all have a lot of extra sort of bits of information in there that don't pertain to the project, not only does it sort of get in the way of being able to find the right information, but it potentially could be saying something that goes counter to what you actually want somebody to do. If you have too much excess information, there's bound to be something in there that's actually not what you mean, and so, therefore it's gonna cause trouble.

You're looking at things that are just difficult to do, and if they're difficult to do, then there's sort of a desire, sort of a human instinct desire to kind of make it easier, and so you're trying to push back on that and make sure that they have enough information to be able to do the difficult thing. And then of course, anything that's expensive because things that are expensive, if they go wrong, well then it's expensive to fix. So that's where litigation comes from, those kinds of issues.

You might also tag it to what's been changed on the drawing sheets, you'd have the sheet numbers, the drawing numbers, that kind of thing listed on the addenda, if there was a change, and that would be a useful thing, it's just not as important as doing it in the project manual, 'cause, as I said, it's just so hard to find any change that happens in a project manual. Another way that you'll often see this done is that project manuals, like drawing sets, are always dated. They must have a date on them in order for them to have any legal consequence.

Okay, so you can see that we have a whole list of different pieces of information that are in here, we have the bid submission information, the intent, all the work that's going to be identified, how we're thinking about what this means, the contract time, is the project expected to be months long or years long, all of that sort of stuff is going to be listed out in different ways. And these things tend to be sort of boilerplate, they tend to have a sort of same pattern every time. So some of these might just have one line in it that just says, yeah, there's a contract time, we think it's going to be 120 days.

And the reason that you start in that way earlier on is 'cause first of all, you're trying to sort of gather all your information, but second of all, you need to decide well what is it that you're gonna look up in your spec aggregator? Like how are you going to choose what to do next? Well you need to have something to start from, so bathroom partitions, alright?

So there's quite a lot of issues that would be in that category of general health and mechanical codes where you would be focused mostly on making sure that the information that's really needed specifically by the code officials is clearly shown, but that mostly you're there just to make sure that the overall system actually is compliant and that they have the ability to tell that from the small snippets of information that you supply for them. And, when we look at this list, this is all pretty much part of the building code. The ADA issues, sometimes those are considered separate from the building code, but usually those are considered part of the building code.

Some of the time there are outside people, code officials, who are doing that, but often you're the professional, so you're bringing that level of understanding of the codes and the issues of safety, the health, safety and welfare of the public that you're the one in control of that, so you're just building that into your design, but then there are specific points where you're gonna wanna be able to reference these standards or have the exact right dimensions that are specifically there just to sort of confirm with the code officials that everything is gonna meet those codes and be compliant.

And then this wall type two where the stair surround is, in that situation maybe that's a two hour rated walls, so we've got a couple layers of drywall, got little metal studs on the inside, and you could start to then describe all the different parts of what's going on for that structure and then you'd say well that's UL number whatever it is, and that way a code official looking at this would understand that that is that particular wall type and that particular rating situation and that's gonna be a very particular version of how you're complying with the code in order to make this a reasonably safe building. And then for this exterior wall, well then the question would be does it need to be rated? Does it need to have any of that?

At this phase, you're just trying to make sure that everybody else, the whole team, code officials, contractors, the owners, everybody understands the attempt of how you're going to make the building fit in with these issues, and how it's going to sort of be accomplished to be compliant with the code, so that everybody's on the same page. That's what you're doing at this point. All those design questions have already been answered.

You have to say, "Here's the construction system I want, "and here's the occupancy. "What does that give us, "what does that allow, what can we do?" And then, from there, once you sort of find a construction system and an occupancy that can work together in a range of what's possible for that project, just like we said before, I may need to make it multiple buildings out of one building in order to make it work, in order to make that system make sense. Or maybe I need to go to a better construction system, or a stronger construction system that will make that, all those numbers make sense.

So the dimensions are gonna be there over and over again in ways to sort of explain that yes indeed this does meet code, and yes this is gonna be something that is reasonable for people to go up and down, and it's not gonna cause any more of a trip hazard than any stair might. So what issues are gonna be the most important? Well clearly the riser height.

Doesn't have to be super complicated, but there has to be some place where you are very clearly stating, this is how we're meeting our accessibility issues; this is how we're gonna help people who are hearing impaired; this is how we're gonna help people who are visually impaired, so you could have a very clear moment where that is stated on the set of drawings, and then the code officials understand that you are doing it, and the GCs understand what the issue is; why that design aspect is what it is, so they can know that that is something that's invaluable, and that they need to make sure that they meet that set of rules, so we can keep the building in compliance with those sets of issues. So, an obvious example would be something like a strobe light system for an alarm system, so somebody with a hearing disability can't hear the alarm, that the strobe lights are there in response to that. Another example might be something like brail signage that would have to be set at a very particular height, so you would show the height, you would show the system of brail signage in relationship to the regular signage, and make sure that somebody who is looking at this set of drawings would very clearly understand where those signs would go, what heights they'd be set at, and what the system of organization is for that to be able to be understood by the general contractor to be able to make this system work, so that somebody in a wheelchair can use the wheelchair aspects, somebody that's sight impaired can find the right signage, somebody that's hearing impaired can get out in a fire when the alarm goes off, but they couldn't hear the alarm so the strobe goes off, and so that's working.

So, when we start thinking about that and like how it plays out through a contract document set, well, clearly, it's gonna show up in a lot of different places, and we're not gonna talk about all of them, just gonna mention a few here to sort of be emblematic of the issues that you're trying to get across. And, one of the first ones that I always think of when I start thinking about the kind of health of the public is the idea of the light and vent schedule, so light and vent, that's talking about sunlight coming into the building and air blowing through the building. So, this is really a residential issue, you would have certain issues that are similar in office occupancies and institutional occupancies, but when we say a light and vent schedule, that's usually talking about a residential setting.

So there's certain things that are gonna get called out and they're specific in our graphic, most of the time the zoning information is just here's a list of zoning information, just so the code officials can understand what the project is, they can understand what the context is and know enough information that they can review on behalf of the community, they can review that information reasonably and quickly. Sometimes the zoning officials have to deal with a whole set of very specific rules, so I'm calling it street types here. So the street types are just situations where maybe there's highly pedestrianized urban streets.

Just because somebody gave you a permit previously doesn't mean that you have to sort of blind yourself to seeing something that's clearly not, in your eyes, as the inspector, up to the code. So this is one of those things. Easy to imagine a question that might come at you on this, and people fall into this trap all the time.

There's then a bunch of other possibilities to ways you could think about it but the first things I would think about is really relating the construction type to the occupancy, deciding about whether it's sprinklered or not, and then kind of using this idea of the multiple buildings out of one building is really sort of the smartest ways, the sort of reasonable ways and the ways that have the most flexibility to them in terms of making a building that's bigger than what the code is allowing you to build. Alright number five. How do code officials regulate uses and occupancies in a given location?

So design development is where things are becoming real, it's real materials, it's not just a schematic idea, you're getting much more detailed sense of the costs at that point. And then, of course, the big leap change is when we get to the end of CDs, the CD set, the contract document set, the end of that is technically the bidding. So we're not actually doing officially any cost estimating at that point.

When we talk about the programming stand, typically we're talking about taking the program and really trying to understand it in terms of a general idea of square footage. And then comparing that square footage to a overall per square foot cost. So let's say it's $200 a square foot, sort of general cost in that region for that type of project.

It's with real information that they're able to say, "I can see that this is really worth that extra 500,000, "so we're gonna go with the full bid "even though we said originally "that we're gonna go with the lower one." As long as you were able to bring it in at the right price, using all those different systems, the adds, the deducts, all those different ways of keeping control of it, then that a way of meeting your contract in those situations. So, adds and deducts, big typical part of it, unit pricing, which we've discussed a little bit before. It's a way of saying, "We just don't know "if we're gonna be able to the terrazzo floor.

It might be that the parking lot has parking for 100 cars and we're gonna do an alternate for an extra 20 spaces, something like that, where they're relatively big-ticket items and the idea is, you're just trying to aim down to find where the bids that come back match the budget that we have, because if we just say, here's the plan, here's the idea, like give us the number for this exactly, and it comes back at $500,000 more than we have, that means we have to go back through the whole bid process and redo it again. But if we can have enough information in here that we can sort of whittle the project down, like we have, all right, bidder C came through as the low bid, but when we add the alternate on, they're alternate is a lot higher. It actually makes it so that if we're gonna go for the alternate, bidder B may be better.

It's like we said, the whole point here is that you have enough information that you can make a reasonable cost decision, but it may not be about the cost, it may be that you realize, "well, "we really want this other part to still be included," it may be that you're saying, "it's really about the scope "that we're making a decision from." So, getting good information back, that gives you enough information, enough comparable information, that you and the client have the ability to really make reasonable, logical decisions, that get them the project that they want, hopefully at the price point that they're looking for. And, in order to do that, sometimes you'll find, well, we really need to ask for more information. Now, you hope not to do that, because, especially in kind of mid to smaller projects, it just seems like a big effort, it just seems like it's a problem, it's hard to get the contractors to refocus on a bid, it's hard to, kind of, go through the whole process again, it takes a bunch of time, but, if you don't have the right information, you should go back and re-do it.

Depends on what those elements are, maybe it's relatively easy for some, but probably a bunch of those are going to be fairly difficult to do, and so you're putting a lot of extra work onto folks, so that's gonna be one thing that's gonna start to push against you a little bit, but the other thing is, you start to say, 42 line items for unit pricing, that starts meaning, not everything fits into the unit pricing sort of concept. Like, if you say, well, "let's give us a unit pricing, "you know, we've got one layer of drywall "on most of the partition walls, "but give us a unit price in case we want "to put two layers of drywall." So you've got that, sort of, as one of your general unit price things, gonna give you some options. Well, a typical contractor's gonna look at that, and say, "wait a minute, that's a one-hour wall, "and that's a two-hour wall, "why would you get a unit price on a difference "between a one-hour wall and a two-hour wall?" Like, that means you don't know whether it should be a one-hour wall or a two-hour wall.

So there's sort of a control thing that has happened here that the pricing is actually being done not by internal folks in the architect's office but actually by this construction manager and so the architectural phases are being done in between this other third party going through it and then they're gonna be giving feedback to the changes that would need to happen through this series of steps through the design process. And then eventually they are then just taking that and hiring out all the different subs so they're acting kind of like the GC. It's a little different but essentially like the GC but as essentially an employee of the owners.

There's a whole series of ways that this is done, you'll often find if you're doing kind of online estimating where you have those sort of question answer things where you put a bunch of information in and, you know, yes it's a wood siding and, you know, it's got this kind of floor and this kind of structure and you're typing all that information in, somewhere along the way you've typed in what the zip code is of that project, and that's a way for that online cost estimating generator to sort of locate what the local rates would be and then adjust specifically towards that specific local place. So understanding kind of what the real prices are in a very specific local zone is an important aspect of this. And those differences will be a lot.

So kind of having a reasonable number, you're gonna compare those different bids, and you're gonna try to understand what the best bid is out of that group of bids that you received. And then you're gonna mine it, you're gonna analyze them to make sure that not only is it the low bid, but that it's the best bid. So the first and kind of obvious answer is I'm gonna compare, when I get a bid in, I'm gonna compare it to the other bids.