ARE 5.0 Project Planning & Design Exam Prep

So we're starting to synthesize together not just what the client wants in the program, but also what's expected, what's the real world experience, what is the cultural expectations for how people are gonna actually use this structure, whatever it is, so we're trying to put all that stuff together, and you know, we're calling it schematic design and then design development, so we're moving from the previous ideas of the early schematic designs. Now, we're going into the finalizing. We're making sure we have a set of options that we really like and that are really meeting the goals of the program.

We're gonna start looking at some example projects and some different ways of thinking about different issues in a matrix idea. We're gonna think about different scenarios, so we'll have some sort of posed concepts of different ways of thinking about things to sort of try to make real some of the discussions that we talk about in the lecture forum. We'll look at some documents and sort of try to understand how those relate to the lecture.

We're at that spot where we're taking ideas and we're throwing them out and we're making sure that we're really focused on the ones that we think are going to be helpful and work well and kind of get us a better building for the client, for the public, for everybody that's actually going to be very useful. So, that would be one example. Another example might be, you know, this is all well and good for the south side of the building, but what does it speak to for the other sides of the building?

Right, these are the kinds of things that we would have to have a very firm idea about the soil and its capacity before we were able to make any really strong decisions about those structural ideas and where we're gonna be digging down to so soils, so we're talking about bedrock. We're talking about different kinds of rock and boulders and gravel, sands, silt, down to the little tiny particles of clay and each of them has these different sets of ways that they tend to operate and so they'll have different amounts of bearing capacity as we move along. So the rocks will have much higher bearing capacity.

So the thought here is that as the rain water comes down onto this parking lot, it's gathering in the parking lot and then it's finding its way through that hole in the curb and it's filling up this area of this little ditch that was there, and that ditch is then either running towards a retention pond or something along those lines or it's just a place where water can gather, like the same way that a retention pond is, and it's planted in such a way that the plants are ones that can be soaked or can be dry, so you have to use very particular plantings in a spot like this to make sure that they're not gonna all die if there's a particular dry spell and it doesn't fill with water, but also that they're not gonna all die if we get three big rainstorms in a row and the thing is soaking, soaking wet for a while, so from the bioswale, either it's flowing towards something like a detention pond or it's slowly letting that moisture penetrate through the soils, so you'd wanna really think about what those soils were like in order to let that happen, 'cause you don't wanna penetrate too fast 'cause you don't wanna saturate the system below, but you wanna make sure that it's actually getting rid of the water so that it has the ability to take on more water later, or it's also potentially evaporating away to the sky, so these are systems for dealing with storm water and if we start saying, well, we're gonna use bioswales, it's gonna be great, we're gonna get a LEED point, you know, we're gonna love it, well, that's great, but now, suddenly, we have this thing where the way I've just designed this, I've just added a good 25 feet between my two sets of parking lots. Do I have enough room for that? Is there site space for that?

Another issue that's really important when we're thinking about finalizing that building location and understanding the site in clear, straightforward design ways that will lead us to a good design down the road is gonna be the idea of environmental information. So we've talked about the idea of environmental reports in other locations. The short version of it is that environmental reports come in two varieties, phase one and phase two.

So, they're looking at a lot of information, but they're doing most of it from, you know, their office, and going through data records online, and things like that, and then they do a bit of a walkthrough and, look around, but they're not testing anything, they're just doing research, they're looking at it with a knowledgeable eye. So, the idea of the Phase One is, before you start getting into the all the testing, and all the cost, and the difficulty, and this, specialty equipment that it takes to really get deep into environmental testing, to look at asbestos, and lead, and oil tanks and all of those kinds of things that often show up on job sites. Before you get into all of that, do you even need to really bother doing any of that, right?

So they're starting off with these very sort of broad views of like this is how we're gonna do it, this the work that we're gonna do. This is how we're gonna talk about it. Then they're gonna say, this is the process that we went through, here's all the different parts of the process, here's each of those parts in more detail.

Your role is to help the owner, help your client to understand what those recommendations are, and to then find a way that those recommendations become part of the contract documents so that they are sort of using the recommendations from the environmental engineers, and you're putting them into the contract documents in such a way that they sort of make sense, right? So if we were encapsulating, you would be talking about well, okay the system of encapsulation would be concrete slab on top or something like that, how thick is a slab, et cetera. So you might be in consultation with the environmental engineer to make sure that that system of encapsulation would actually meet the recommendation that they were talking about, but you would be doing the contract documents part.

Well, encapsulation in that situation it's a bunch of kids, they're being like kids, they're banging things around, maybe there's little kids. Little kids maybe like chewing on the window casing which I know sounds kind of crazy but apparently it's things kids do and there's a lot of opportunity for what we thought was encapsulation to not really be steady. To not really be something that actually will last for any length of time given that use.

So if we're in a place where we're concerned about that, maybe it's not so much about the storm water, but maybe it's more about the kind of efficient use of the water. So here we have irrigation systems, and we're putting sprinklers out into spray over big swaths of grassland, and imagine you're throwing water into the air and then about half of it evaporates before it even gets to the grass, like that just seems kind of crazy Well, if we take it even one step farther back, and we realize that water is often clean, potable water that has, you know, could be used in cooking and drinking it, that's very expensive water to just be tossing into the air like that. So perhaps there is an efficient system, maybe through drip lines or maybe through using cisterns to collect the water find ways to reuse rain water.

It's aspirational in a sense and it wants to be sort of pushing people towards this idea of sustainability. So there are most of the time going to be very logical, straightforward reasons, and they're gonna be about does it save money? Does it save energy?

So, surveys are gonna be very important in this stage because you're gonna be using those to determine how this thing actually fits onto this site.

Easements are another sort of one of those concepts similar to covenants, in that they are rules that you have to follow on a site, but the easement rules are about any number of different possible issues that could come up where there's a contract between two entities, and that contract is playing out through the site. And so maybe I'm a utility company and you have a site. I'm gonna say, "All right, I need to be able "to run my power lines here." You would say, "Sure, but we're gonna charge you." So we would pay for that right, but then we're not just paying for the right to you, we're paying for the right as an easement, and so that rides with the deed.

There's a bunch of rules that the overall development has sort of attached to the deed of each of these different sites, and this front dashed line, here towards the front of the property, that looks like a setback, but the setbacks aren't something that would show up in the survey, setbacks are part of the zoning code, and that's something that you would bring to the project, so the fact that this is in here, that's actually referring to the fact that it's part of a covenant, this is an overall building development, set of developments where these are separate pieces of land, but when I buy one of these pieces of land, I'm buying into the whole concept and what they want, in this particular situation, they want the buildings to be set back away from the street, just a little bit, but mostly to be up close, but not right at the property edge, they want to have a little bit of breathing room, sort of creates a sort of look, there's a little bit of a green lawn in front of each of these. These are small manufacturing facilities, they're a little worried that they're gonna look a little messy, and so they want to make sure that everybody has a nice clean, green lawn in front so that it sort of enhances the look overall for everybody. So it looks like a setback, which would be a zoning issue, but in fact, it's a covenant issue, and it rides with the deed, it's part of the overall development.

That's where we're saying, alright, we understand the context and how it fits into a neighborhood, into a city, into a region, and we wanna be sort of helpful in that and be aware of the advantages of tying into those systems, so tying into transit systems, tying into bike lanes, tying into existing road structures and really kind of being useful, seeing those as useful systems that can enhance our project and a way that our project can enhance those systems, so being sort of super aware of what those systems are and how the project can either be helpful to those systems or be not enhancing those systems, so the idea of being very aware of what is going in the context and then understanding how that impact us. So an example with TOD might be where the front door is, where do people come in and out of the building. If I have a situation where I've got a very important corner with very big bus lines that go back and forth on a set of streets, and I have a project over here and it's a kinda big project and maybe there's another building here that's somebody else's.

So, this discussion of context will have a number of different points along the way and the point here being that we want to think about it, we wanna analyze it, we want to respect it to the extend that that's reasonable and possible and then respond to the analysis and the sense of respecting that context, so, what are those issues and how do they start to literally impact where our doors go, where the building sets back to, how much glass there is, where the overall flow of pedestrian people will go on this site, all of those things start getting impacted by these issues of the context and that really is where we start making the leap from just analysis into design.

When we're talking about context, it's kind of like we're talking about design. Even though when really we're talking about design, we're not talking about design, right? What we're talking about is approach to design.

It's one thing to have people who are particularly sophisticated to be sort of confused, it's quite another to have people who may be less sophisticated, smaller children, people who have mental issues, things that can cause real problems in terms of clarity and wayfinding, so if you are clear in your behavioral expectations people will know where to go. Everybody will know where to go in that universal design sense. If you are not, then you're having to battle over that in order to give people signage or some other tool to figure out where they're supposed to go and then you're making people uncomfortable and you're creating difficult situations.

"Do I go that way or do I go that way?" And that question makes them stop when there's a car behind them that doesn't realize they're gonna stop. So, in general, I'm always gonna try to keep that traffic flow moving and then coming back and out. So, again, you're looking for things to be the way that people expect them to be.

It's that people going the wrong place is actually detrimental, it's actually annoying, and it makes people feel bad and it makes people feel badly about the project. It's more than just the sense of things should look like what they are, it's people need to be able to move through a space and get to the right spot. You don't want to waste everybody's time, you don't want to create a bad feeling.

We wouldn't want to dig out in such a way that the water flows, say that way, or that the water flows that way, because it's going to cause difficulties at these points. It's going to be changing the relationship with your neighbors. It doesn't really make any sense, like how would you have it flow this way without just having a big retaining wall there or something?

It's so obvious, but it's still important to say because it's such an easy mistake to make 'cause you have to be really careful if I have a property line for example, here and I started to manipulate this swale as it was coming around, if instead of doing it exactly in that location where I did it, if I started to do it like that I've just excavated on somebody else's land and that's a really easy mistake to make because you're thinking about from the sort of big picture standpoint and you start to lose track of where the little end tailings of these decisions are. Clearly, I can't excavate somebody else's land. Same would be true where if I happened to have a tree here as soon as I start excavating below the drip line of the tree I've effectively killed that tree because I'm cutting into its roots.

So any water that's coming down this way is going to start to pick up on the little ditch that's right next to the little swale that's right next to our walkway. And then I'm going to have another one here. So I've evened these out, so now as I come along, they're all at a sort of reasonably close to the same distance apart from each other.

The only way they would be willing for you to not be deferential to that context, would be if they were also giving you future information that you were going to be deferential to a future context. The idea here is that you're a good citizen, and that you're fitting into the world. There's a general ethic of the exam is that idea of being a good citizen, and the thinking about that is that we're sort of helping our neighbors, we're being protective of the health, safety, and welfare.

If we were having those cars come out to a local street, it's just gonna overwhelm that local street. It may be our only choice, but if we are looking at this abstractly, we would definitely want it to go to the collector. That's gonna be that bigger street that has more name recognition, more expectation of volume, and probably working a little bit faster.

It's not going to be necessarily the same letters that I'm using here, but just that sense that there's a set of categories and that they then go from a smaller density to a larger density, or a larger intensity, a little different from density, and they'll be a series of these different focal points, business versus commercial versus residential versus manufacturing et cetera. These are sort of the basic ways that these things start to get divided out, this understanding becomes important as we start to formalize and finalize the process. If we were in a situation where we had one of these special use elements, and we had to sort of make a case for it, then now would be the time that I would do that.

If I have a site and that site is on a street and I have similar sites nearby, if I have a zero setback and that building front is gonna be right there, that's gonna create a sense of intensity. It's gonna create a retail kind of thinking and I'm gonna be able to put that building in such a way that it goes right up to that edge. But if I had instead of that a setback that was some number of feet back and that building's gonna sit back deeper into that space, well, that's clearly gonna have a different type of intensity.

Some locations might use a slightly different terminology, but most places will call it FAR, and it's the way of relating a site's area, so if we have a site and we're gonna build a building on it, we can say, alright, let's say we're gonna build that building and footprint right there, and we wanna control the overall mass of that structure, so we can relate the number of square footage of the floor, how many square feet of floor we have through this whole building, we could relate that to the area of the site, so we have the site area and we are relating it to the building area, and we put that as a ratio and then that is a very useful number for us to be able to, say, if the zoning department says you have a floor area ratio of two, that means you can build two times the site area of buildable, enclosed interior area and so if we wanna have a really dense and big building in a neighborhood, we can say, alright, that FAR wants to be five or 10 or 12. That means we'd be building 10 times, five times, 12 times the area of the site, so that becomes a very big building. It could be that we say no, this area, this district wants to be a very low intensity, a very quiet, a very family friendly place, a place where kids are running around the front yards.

A parking space in general, we have a sort of typical parking space, it's gonna be approximately nine foot by 19 feet. This might be as small as eight foot, it might be eight and a half feet, it might be 18 feet, it might be 20 feet. So it'll be somewhere in that range, but the ones that I usually use are good to remember are nine by 19.

So in that kind of situation, it's possible that you might have a situation where the zoning code or some other similar law, rule that you would have to meet would say, "All right, in these kinds of situations, "a developer would have to pay an impact fee." And that impact fee is something that's meant to cover all of those extra costs that would come from something like that. So you might be a per unit impact fee. Maybe it's $1,000 per unit or $2,000 per unit.

So that idea of the sort of sense of the impact of a project can also start impacting the idea of impact fees, and an impact fee is this sense that if you're going to do a project that is likely to cause environmental trouble, there are situations where you can be charged, not you as an architect, but the project can be charged impact fees, which means that, while you may not be forced to add wetlands or do something like that, it might be that you are charged these fees so that federal government or the state or the city will have the ability to, you know, maybe it's plant more trees to stop the erosion that's started from the process that you started or to create a clear, better watershed system so that water that was being collected but now, because of you where your project is, it's not being collected as well, so they're able to create some other place to have that collection, so the impact fees, this idea is that the developer would pay something in order to balance out the general needs of the area in terms of environmental problem that's being caused by this particular development. Relatively rare, doesn't happen a huge amount. The vast majority of projects roll through without anything like that, but if you are building in environmentally delicate areas or areas that are deemed special from a waterway standpoint or a watershed or wetlands, those kinds of spots specifically, you could very likely have a situation where you end up having to pay impact fees, so again, the main takeaway on this is just sort of being aware that there are these other players involved.

And if the answer is yes, they know the building well, no, they're not particularly vulnerable, and you know, it's not gonna be that many people per square foot and it's not a very big project, well, then all of those things are leading us to say, alright, then we have a lot of choice in terms of what we can build this out of. We have a lot of choice in terms of the sort of materials that we use and the sort of manner that we do it because we're not necessarily all that worried about those people, and so we think they'll be able to get out of the building if there's a problem without us providing a lot of extra help along the way. If our answers to those questions were yes, it's a very vulnerable population, yes, it's a lot of people per square foot, yes, it's a very big group, it's a very big scale of a project, if we start answering yes to all of those things, then that's gonna make us choose.

Typically, if we're trying to get through the building code and really understand how it's going to impact our design, after we understand use and occupancy, the second thing that we're going to look into is going to be the construction type. We're going to want to know, what are we building this building out of? Not necessarily all the materials, but just what are the main structural processes that we're going to use?

So this is one of those examples where what you're saying here is it's not saying you can't do a 25,000 square foot per floor building. What it's saying is given that use and that construction type, that's the largest area that we can have that is considered one protected space. And the thought there is if I have a fire in that location, it might impact this area.

And you know that, alright, for this situation, we're gonna need to have all the exterior bearing walls be three hour walls when they're facing another building, but maybe they're only two hour walls when they're facing a street where there's less likelihood that fire could be sent across to another building or something like that. And maybe all the columns are set up in a way that they're all gonna be two hours. We take our notes.

It's very dangerous if you start getting those dead-end corridors too long, so that's the very likely kind of question you might get, something that talks about the idea of the egress path and that you're supposed to notice that there's sort of the danger of that dead-end corridor, but that if it's of a reasonable length, this sort of small, little, maybe it's 10 feet long or 15 feet long or 20 feet long. Well, that's gonna be in sort of a reasonable category, but as soon as you start getting longer than that into these much longer numbers, that's not gonna be reasonable. Now, in some settings, you'll find that I can have a much longer dead-end corridor as long as it's well fire-protected from a fire rating standpoint, and there's a full building sprinkler system happening here.

If this is just in a single-family house, it might be 36 inches where the expectation is just either people going up or down, they're not going both ways, but in a situation like this that's a public stair, I need to have both people going. 42 is really gonna be the minimum. There's a few other little bits.

If for whatever reason a fire starts and a little bit of flame gets to that flammable material, I may have a relatively robust overall assembly that won't let the fire get through, but if that flame spread is very, very bad, and it just lets the fire easily transmit across the whole face of that wall, or across the ceiling, or across the floor, that, that could be really problematic. It isn't only about can the fire get from one side to the other. It's also the sense, will a fire get spread, and will it move very quickly?

So something like the plumbing counts, how many toilets you need, how many urinals you need, how many lavatory sinks you would need, how those are gonna be attached to the plumbing systems to make sure that it's protecting the system, protecting the water supply, protecting the sort of health for all the people who are gonna be using these things. So if I'm thinking about the plumbing count, for example, it's gonna be directly related to the use. This situation is probably not gonna be related to the construction type, but it will be directly related to the use or occupancy.

Like certain things it doesn't make sense for, but those kind of everyday spaces, like an office building, or like a retail space, those kinds of spaces would absolutely have the energy code attached to them. So, like I said, this is something that didn't really exist a long time ago, now it's sort of come into vogue. And the whole point is to sort of think of it from the city's standpoint, because we don't want to keep building these power plants, we don't want to have all this extra pollution, so instead of putting out all this excess energy that we don't need, we find ways to sort of limit it and keep it reasonable.

Sort of understand that if I have a situation where there's a floor 18 inches above another floor and I need to put a ramp in, well I can do that using just a straight ramp. I don't need to really worry about it. But if somebody says well why don't we put a ramp between the third floor and the fourth floor, you would immediately realize that's gonna be a really long ramp because not only would I have to have all of those vertical inches but I'd have to have a number of landings in there as well.

Sometimes that's gonna mean making accessible units, sometimes that's gonna be making adaptable units that could become accessible, and sometimes that's gonna be making visitable units that sort of allow people to be more a part of the community more easily.

There are gonna be times when you don't always have the options to be able to always have everybody use the same front door. Just sometimes it just won't work. But if it does work, if there is a way for it to work, it is absolutely the expected and assumed way that it should work.

Imagine you have a situation where, I've got a set of stairs, and those stairs are floating, so there's nothing down below them and that goes up and I have somebody walking along who's using one of those canes that they sweep back and forth, and as they're sweeping back and forth, when they get up close, there's nothing to warn them, the cane doesn't have anything to hit, until it's actually too late, and they've just walked into the system. They just walked into your beautiful stair. Uh, so clearly that's not good enough.

You can imagine that a number of other issues is gonna be that if that's a really heavy door, how hard would it be to open that when you're in a wheelchair, so your wheelchairs rolling and it's hard to, you have to like lock in the wheelchair in order to get enough pull to be able to open that door so there are rules about how many PSI it takes, how much PSI it takes in order to pull open a door or to push open a door, and that's in order to make it sort of plausible both for somebody in a wheelchair, but also elderly people or people in a walker that just don't have enough oomph to be able to kind of push something open. So if you're talking about making something accessible, not only is the door sort of important in terms of how much space it has around it, but also in the actual physical opening of it. So this seems fairly simple and straight forward, this is something that just seems sort of obvious once you start to say it, but it's very easy to kind of not notice the desk that comes in right in that corner, or a wall that finds its way 16 inches off that door handle.

Here's an example on the push side where it's only 42 inches depth away from the wall, but that's because I can fairly easily sort of pull up sideways and push that door open. So I'm pulling up, getting the door, backing up a little bit and then going down through. But I have quite a number of different ...

But that in general I need that extra few inches, that 36 inch space, in order to have a place for my elbows to go when I'm using the actual process of kind of motoring this wheelchair along. So that's an important concept to know, 36 inches, but with occasional moments can get a little bit thinner, doesn't have to be walls, could be from furniture, but just that sense that you need to provide these sort of pathways in order to get everywhere. One of the sizes worth remembering is the 30 inches by 48 inches.

And it's useful especially in an adaptive reuse where you're sort of changing things that are sort of partly existing and partly new and trying to make those things work, but also just in any situation where I have multiple floor finishes or just going from one building to another building through some sort of access point, a bridge or something. So that concept is important to know and I would actually remember the 1/2 inch max and the 1/4 inch vertical max.

It's less of an issue these days 'cause the pay phones aren't around, but there's still a lot of signage, shelving units, display cases, all sorts of different animals that can become problematic, so you just finding some way, if you need to make it bigger than that four inch, you're finding some way like these little railings or curbs or something that sort of signals to people that there's a problem ahead.

Clearly, there's plenty of people in a wheelchair that can't reach as high as 48 inches or can't reach as low as 15. It could be a much tighter range or maybe don't have enough force in their hands to be able to flip a switch or take something off a shelf at all in any way. So, the point here is not that these standards are meant to make it so that everybody can do everything.

For bathrooms, the accessibility dimensions start getting very complicated and specific, and there's quite a few different dimensions to think about. For the most part, we're not gonna really worry too much about those for this, because you're not really gonna be sort of asked to memorize all those different dimensions. But there are some ideas that are probably worth keeping in mind. Some thoughts, for example, for tubs, you can see in this layout, there's a place to sit. And so that becomes a reasonable spot for somebody in a wheelchair or a walker, or some other mobility issue, to be able to sort of get onto first and sit with their legs just on the floor, and then swinging their legs over, they can then get to the tub, and kinda slide into the tub, by using the grab bars to hold onto. So, the idea of the seat makes a big difference. To the point that in this other situation where there is no little seat, the mandate is that you actually put one in. It would be a seat that's removable so that it could be moved out of the way, or it could be moved to whatever the best location is for that particular person. But that idea, if I have a tub, to be able to sort of sit, swing my legs over, and then get into the tub from there, or just sit on, use the chair itself, and use a flexible hose type nozzle for showering. Something like that is sort of reasonable as well. But the idea that you need to be able to think it through how somebody would be sort of moving into this, how do they go from one situation all the way into a tub, or standing into a shower situation. And the grab bar has become very important, because that's A). How you hold yourself steady, so you'll see the upper height here is really about standing and holding yourself steady. And the lower height is really about having something that you can grab onto and pull yourself up in order to get out of a tub.

It depends on the situation, but if it is going to be an accessible toilet, there has to be sort of a reasonable understanding of what those rules are, so that you're not leaving yourself to small a space down the road, when you start getting into the contract documents to make that stuff all work out from a dimensional standpoint.

Couple things that will be fairly universal though, the height of the kitchen counter top will be set at 34 inches, or it'll be adjustable which means that you have to think about how the cabinets underneath it work in order to make that happen, and that there will always be what's referred to as the work surface and then also similar situation at the sink and both of those situations are gonna be set up that somebody in a wheelchair would be able to roll up and do whatever it is that they're gonna be doing, cooking, cutting carrots, you know making a pie, whatever it is, but they need to have some place that they can do that where they can roll up underneath that counter, so there's gotta be a spot where there's no cabinet underneath. You'll see that each of these examples has a spot where there's no cabinets underneath, and the same would be true at the sink. With the work surface, you can find any reasonable place where it works out, sort of logically and reasonably, but for the sink, it has to be at the sink because everybody in a kitchen setting needs to be able to roll up to a sink and get a glass of water, or do the dishes, or whatever it happens to be.

We have a pretty clear idea because we start looking at design development at the UL and make sure that there are systems that we can use in order to get the fire ratings that we need. And then, by the time we get into contract documents, which would be the next exam, by the time we get into that we've got it all drawn out with all the layers of drywall and how often the studs are and what kind of Sound Batt insulation is in there, that kind of stuff. So, you're moving along with the process of the design, but you start with what you need to know at the early phases and make sure that's clear.

And then, there's a couple of different versions of how many layers and that has to do with how many hours of rating we're looking for. So in the first section, we see the runners. So, those are the little steel runners for these metal studs, which would be down on the floor and up at the ceiling.

Drywall is kind of fascinating, the gypsum is sort of interesting, the way that this does it, is that when it gets heat on it the heat actually chemically changes the gypsum, and so the gypsum in that chemical change process, because when you have a chemical change the chemical change either gives off heat or absorbs heat and in this case it absorbs heat, and so the reason that drywall's so great for this is that it manages to absorb an enormous amount of heat and in that process will deaden the fire before it can get through the wall. It will eventually damage the drywall so much that it'll start to crumble, and it will eventually get through anyway, but it will last for a period of time while that gypsum is going through that process. So this is a sort of simple idea.

Then thinking back to the design, bid, build, in that situation you're starting the design process, you're going along through schematic design, design development, all that stuff. We get to the end of that process and all the way through there we've been thinking about the relationship to the code and we've been figuring out what the best way is to include that into that discussion, and then at that end point, that's when you actually have the moment with the building officials and you're getting that permit. So you've been thinking about it all the way along, you are complete with your drawings, and then you send it in for permit, and or review it for permit, and then there is a review, and then everything rolls forward either complicatedly or straightforwardly, and then the construction starts.

Now, at this stage of a project, where we're talking about that kind of schematic design and design development thinking, really the place that's gonna be dramatically impacted by that is gonna be the fire ratings spot. If you start thinking about the exterior wall systems, we're gonna be making sure that those fit in with the building code requirements for what the fire ratings are for structural walls or for exterior walls. We've talked a little bit about the idea of fire jumping from one building across a property line to another.

A typical egress stair in a typical office, you're probably going to have, let's say, nine foot from the floor, a person, nine foot from the floor to the ceiling, then there's going to be a little bit of space for lights and for sprinkler systems and things like that, then there's going to be a bit of space for the duct work, then there's going to be a little bit of space for the structure, and then the top slab of some sort or whatever the structural system is. And so by the time we end up putting all of that together, that's probably somewhere three feet to four and a half feet, something like that, so let's call that out as, say, four feet, which means that that overall number is 13 feet. So our floor-to-floor is 13 feet.

Remember the other issue about the stairs is first of all, it's the total number of people who are using the two stairs, if I need to add a third stair or a fourth or fifth, the other issue's gonna be that if I'm making a wider and wider stair, at some point, it gets too wide, and I now have a third line of people running down in a panic in the middle of the stair, and they need to have their own handrail. So once I get beyond a certain distance, depends on the code, but it just sort of sometimes past 60, maybe 66, as soon as I start getting past that, I have to start adding a middle handrail in order for it to meet the requirement that there's always a handrailing nearby. So that width starts to jump pretty quick.

In the summertime inside our buildings, we're looking for anything that's gonna keep us from sweating too much, anything that's gonna keep us from feeling uncomfortable, and too humid. So we're looking for a temperature that's probably in the range, something over 72, probably around 75, maybe up to close to 80. As soon as you start getting over 80, in a building, you're probably starting to get out of people's normal comfort zones.

Then, that's gonna make a big difference on whether that glass is such a cold body that would then pull our heat. If we can do it as a two-pane glass, then that is gonna pull a lot less heat. So again, all of these things are tied together.

So we're gonna be thinking about as we start talking about these different systems and what some of the choices are, we're gonna be thinking about them mostly from a comfort and kind of meeting the goals standpoint and does it meet all the code issues and all of that, but we also have to make sure that it's gonna meet our cost standards as well.

Now, it's important to remember that what we're talking about for this exam, we're talking about the kind of planning stages, so we're making decisions, we're choosing the systems, we're leaving open the options, we're making sure there's enough room for the system that we've chosen. That we're sort of doing those sort of early phase thinking about, okay we went through a bunch of options in the planning phase, in the programming phase where we thought through what some of the possibilities were, but now we're at a spot where we're in the planning and we're really getting into making specific choices. Then in the next exam, we'll be actually thinking about, all right we chose that particular system in the previous exam, this exam, and now we have to size it.

So the hydronic systems have a bunch of advantages, but, like I was saying when I was talking about the air-based systems, the disadvantage of the hydronic systems is that they take awhile, it just takes a long time to move that much heat and get it to actually warm up the radiant elements enough that they start being useful from that process. You'll find that there's actually a lot of the time when we have a combination of hydronic and air-based, so we're moving heat around the facility through the hydronic system and then locally are using air-based elements where we can get that heat quickly out to the people so you get that benefit of the ease of movement with the hydronic system, but then the ease of connection to the people and the speed of connections to the people with that air-based system. Heat pumps are the idea where we just have these systems that can exchange heat.

So it's a constant loop where in the middle is a little break in the loop and that break is where we are and that's the room that we're in and the air is blowing across the room and eventually gets picked up by the return system in order to get brought back and reconditioned. So we have this full on loop. So the boiler had its own loop and then the air has its own loop.

Where would I rather have maybe some long distances and just chilled water pipes, because that'll travel easily in a pipe for a long distance, whereas if I was trying to have cold air blow a long distance, that duct work is gonna be enormous, and it's gonna take up a huge amount of space, but also, it's going to lose its coolness pretty fast. So, I'm having to use the fact that I have these four loops in my initial design thinking. I have to bring this to the table in order to sort of plan out a logical system.

We're going out into that trunk and then from there it's gonna start to branch off, and we're gonna have some of the branches going in various directions. Eventually, the air will be sort of blowing through and down each of these different branch lines, and eventually out through the diffusers, out into the space, so you get air sort of blowing out into the whole range of different, in this case, office space. And that system would then continue around the building.

And that's going to force that conditioned air that you've just blown in, it's going to force that air to sort of find its way through the space. And it's going to go around the desks and around the people and it will eventually get to that return diffuser. So as that air is moving through the space you're separating it in order to force the air to sort of constantly be sort of doing a change of air through the whole space.

Well, it's gonna come through these, what are essentially holes in the ceiling, these sort of diffuser spots that get put up in the ceiling, and so this return is just gonna pull right through from that office up into the ceiling space, and then from there it's gonna go right into that that return system so that effectively that ceiling space becomes part of our overall duct system and when we do that that's referred to as the plenum. So you'll see the word plenum a few times, we'll talk about it at various points along the way, that concept allows even fewer times, when you might have to have the return duct and the supply duct cross each other, because when I start thinking about, from a system where I have this kind of system I might have, say, offices over here, and then here's my return duct, here's my supply duct, very far away from each other. This one is letting off towards the perimeter, but it's also letting off into the other office spaces and then the return is just up above the ceiling, going straight into that plenum space, so as the air comes out into the office, it eventually finds a space up into the ceiling, and then it will eventually get all the way over to that return system, and the same thing would happen from here.

There's gonna be spots where you have to be able to get up, which means if you don't have a drop ceiling, if you have a drywall ceiling, I'm going to have access panels at various locations. And so sometimes it's actually better to have this nice, clean grid which just becomes sort of a field, if you will, it just becomes a simple grid that you'd sort of dies away in your brain, you don't think about it, it's just a simple idea. As opposed to, a beautiful, clean drywall ceiling that I then see three different access panels at different locations, where they sort of pop out and become part of a design, if you didn't even mean 'em to.

I have to make sure that I'm leaving a really sizeable area just for the duct work that might be as large as essentially an elevator or something. So I have, potentially, pretty big holes going through my building that I have to make sure I have accommodated somewhere if I have my air handling units on some other floor, which often will happen. You'll have an air handling unit that may handle, say, two or three floors of space.

That's a lot of volume of air-conditioning, that's a lot of savings that can happen with those residential units compared to those office spaces, it's just that the office spaces really want that flexibility, that ability to shift all that stuff around, so you're spending a lot of money, you're making a bigger building, you're having to air-condition and heat more volume of space in those office spaces, to get all that flexibility, but in those situations it's pretty worth it, but in the residential it just wouldn't be worth it. So these tend to be much more reasonably-priced buildings in order to build them for those reasons, because you're tightening them up so much. And in this case, because of the scale of these systems is so tight and small, that you have a lot more flexibility of sort of finding places to sort of slide them in.

So if I have, for example, a concrete flat slab system, where essentially the entire structure is held maybe within a 12 inch depth, that's going to have a very different impact on what kinds of choices I can make with my design, where the locations of the different duct work is, how I'm going to get across when I do, in those places where I try not to have them cross with each other, the return and the supply, but there's always bound to be some spot where they start to cross. I'm going to have a little bit more flexibility in that flat slab scenario than I would with a structural system that's made out of steel wide flanges where I have big steel beams that are creating a thick depth to the structural line. And I can't easily get those ducts through them.

So, it's just cheaper and easier and simpler to do a plenum up in the ceiling than it is down on the floor. The other issue is if I have plenum down at the floor level, so let's say this is our structural deck down here, so that's the concrete floor say, and then this is the finish floor that's held up off of the structural deck and that's gonna allow, in this case, duct work to happen, supply air and/or return air, depending on what we're talking about here. So, in this situation, we're actually creating a plenum down below our feet.

Well, if we're doing that, then that means we are pushing air farther and so we're probably losing more air in terms of leaking out but also losing the heat or losing the cooling that's in that air through that long duct work that would have to get to everywhere in the building. So, having a single one might give us a bunch of advantages of having one place for maintenance; having one place for noise that an air handling unit creates; having one place where everything gets logically put together. The compressors and the boilers and everything are all right next to each other so it's very efficient from that standpoint.

I mean you mind, but it's not gonna ruin your computer, but if a pipe leaks water, that's definitely gonna be a problem, so you have a much higher tolerance issue on the hydronic systems than you do on the air-based systems, and that can be a real problem. It has to be very well put together for this stuff to work. So there are positives and negatives.

And that way not only can you not have heat coming into that particular space, but if you needed to you could turn off both of those and then pull out the radiator and replace it or maintain it or something. So you have the fairly simple conceptual ideas, pipes have to run through, the pipes are small, relatively easy to get them to fit into walls, and to get 'em to move around the space. The radiators are a little problematic in that they have to be in the space, and so they take up floor area which could be problematic.

Well, this, you have to warm up the entire thickness of a concrete floor, so this can take easily three or four hours to get up to the right temperature, so you go away on vacation and you come back and you turn the heat up, like, wow, it's gonna be three hours before it's even getting really close, so it's not right for every situation but it is a lovely experience, and one of the main reasons it's a lovely experience is that it's the floor that's warm and where are you the most cold in the winter? You are the most cold in your feet, and why in the feet? Because two reasons.

So we have things that we've talked about in the programming phases, and kind of the early design phases of kind of early planning issues, and you're trying to take those goals and figure out which systems, when we put them together, are going to create the sort of best-case scenario for this particular project. And when you're talking about best-case, you're talking about, as I said, the cost and all of that, but also how it affects the people. So for this particular use, will this combination system keep them sort of happy and productive in an office?

Generally that means that the warm body, which would be you, has to radiate its heat to this cold entity and it's just sort of an awkward relationship, it doesn't work as smoothly as a warm radiator or a warm floor radiating to your body. That works really well. So this is a problem from that standpoint and then there's this huge problem with condensation buildup and how do you deal with that, so it's not an obvious choice to use radiant systems for cooling, but there is one way to do it.

In those situations, it's such a big wallop of heat energy and the fact that you're moving so much of it and you don't need to use any pumps or fans or anything like that, that it's actually a pretty efficient system for those kind of big, massive ones, so in those situations, you actually do still see many of the kind of current structures going up will at least be considering steam if they're gonna try to do that multi-building or just big building from a many wing standpoint, but like I say, in the sort of smaller residential stuff that most of us are familiar with, with the steam heat, a little less likely these day, although still does occasionally get used, just the scalding thing alone is enough to turn a lot of people off, but it is kind of an amazing system.

So having this little baseboard system here below that window will, as I said, not only make the person feel better because they're not radiating all their heat to the cold window, but it's also creating a flow of air that's going to start picking up some of that moisture of this nice warm air that is going to go by all of that moisture. And that warm air has the ability to hold more moisture in it, so it's going to grab that air, grab that moisture as it goes by. So we will be reducing all of those problems of the condensate on the glass by having that little animal there of baseboard heating.

It's these sort of specialty moments where you're not gonna be running that electrical heating for months on end, you're just gonna be doing it for very select moments in time at very select temperatures so you don't have to have everything get all the way up to 80 degrees or something like that all the time. You're just, you know, modulating things in order to melt the snow, make people comfortable in a vestibule, give a little bit of warmth to the tile floor so your feet are toasty warm in the morning, that kind of thing. So there are places where electrical heating make perfect sense, and then there's a lot of places where it just doesn't.

Well, that's sort of like why not just have the sun come in in the first place if we're just gonna let that heat energy go into the space. The answer to that is, well, we actually want it to take a long time to get through. That way, we're taking that heat energy in the middle of the day when we kind of don't need it.

I can create a situation where we are accepting a rather large amount of heat through the, from the sun's energy and I can start to create a convective current that's gonna bring the cool air from inside the space, through our greenhouse, and then back into the space eventually falling down in there, and coming back around and creating this convective current of constantly bringing in nice, hot, new air as it gets cycled through this process. If I decide that I don't want that, I can close one of them off, and that'll stop the convective current. It could be that I have operable elements at the top of my greenhouse.

The biggest problem with doing a light shelf on the inside is going to be if the sun is coming in and hitting the shelf after it's gone through the window. That means you're gaining the solar gain on the inside, and so it's bringing that heat in. So it wouldn't make sense to do this in a place where you're really worried, mostly about high level of heat energy coming in, because I would be gaining too much solar gain just from the fact that this shelf is literally inside the glass.

And as the sun is sort of beating down on this building, it's warming up this little tower, and the warm air that is sort of building up in this space starts to find its way and sort of move through and go up to the highest point because that's what warm air is gonna want to do. And so it's pulling itself all the way up to the top. So this doesn't even have anything to do with the windows.

So instead of having the wind going this way, I would actually face it so that the wind is going that way. Seems sort of counterintuitive. Why is the wind scoop facing the wrong way?

We're gonna find a way to shift heat back and forth by putting something down here that is actually colder than the 55 degrees so that when it goes down, it's accepting heat from the ground plane, and then we bring it back up, let it go through its phase change, through this heat exchanger process, and now it's gonna be warmer than the air in the building, and so it's going to give that heat off into the building. You're shifting heat from the ground, then, up into the space. The geothermal is working using heat exchangers, has usually, typically, a few small pumps.

It's the same quantity of light that's leaving that light source, so the distance starts becoming a really important factor. The way the light is focused starts becoming a very important factor. Is the light set up in such a way that there's a reflector so that the light is always focused in one particular direction?

There's gonna be situations where I wanna be able to go in very quickly turn the light on do whatever that I need to do and then leave. There's gonna be situations where there's gonna be a light on forever and ever and it's gonna wanna be really efficient otherwise you're spending a lot of money on it. There's gonna be situations where you gonna wanna have a light on in a very cold winter space in a garage say something like that.

So, we're gonna run through each of the different lighting systems real quick just to make sure we're all on the same page. First one we're gonna start with is incandescents. The incandescents are kind of interesting right now because they have been around for a very very long time, for you know, 100 plus years. But they are also being phased out and so all of the systems when we talk about different lighting systems; the CRI index, for example, it's all based on the idea of an incandescent bulb, so there's all sorts of these references to incandescents when we talk either with clients or through the technical data, or any of these things that everybody refers back to incandescents all the time, and yet we're in the process of actually completely phasing them out just because of their sort of lack of efficiencies. So it's kind of an unusual situation. It's kind of like talking about a phone and talking about dialing on a phone when you know, nobody has used a dial phone in years, so but, because it is this sort of basic understanding and these different ways that we talk about lights, I think it's worth kind of running through it anyway. So, a typical incandescent bulb, as we all know, kind of has that classic bulb shape, and in that classic bulb shape, we've got the ability for essentially one connection to a wire there and the other connection to a wire there and there is a sort of loop up and that loop comes down so one is connected and then the other is connected so that this filament which has a little sort of toaster-y shape to it, lot of surface area, is made out of very particular sets of metals, and those very particular sets of metals, when they get hot, get to a very particular color and so they glow hot. Now, obviously when they get to that specific color, the reason they're glowing hot is that they are, in fact, hot, which means that they're giving off heat, so while we're getting lots and lots of good light, sort of emanating away from this particular point source, as we're getting that light, we're also getting sort of massive amounts of heat that also are emanating away from that point source. It's essentially little tiny toaster inside a protected glass environment. There's some huge advantages to the incandescents: One giant advantage is it's really fast. You turn it on and it heats up and it is effectively on immediately. There's the subtle delay for it to actually heat up, but it's so fast you don't even really notice that, and that speed is really fairly unusual in the lighting industry. LEDs are pretty fast, and there's a couple of other things but a lot of the other really efficient lighting systems actually have pretty significant delays and there's a meaningfulness to that in certain situations. So that's great, they're also dimmable in fairly sort of easy ways. So you don't have to have a lot of specialty electronics or anything like that you just control the amount of power that's going through it, and that will control the amount of light coming out of it. So very simple, straightforward, dimmable, that's super handy. The fact that it produces so much heat and that its efficiency is so low, that's really the big problem with them and that's why they're being sort of slowly phased out. The shapes, the A's are sort of the, kind of classic lightbulb shape, the G's are globes, which are a bit more spherical, PAR's are parabolic, sort of directional, C's and other similar ones are shaped like candles, there's a whole series of different shapes. When we talk about the size of these, you'll see, like, for example, an A29. Well the "A29" refers to the A shape, which is that classic shape, and the 29 would refer to 29 eighths of an inch. So its just sort of one of those sort of funny ones where they, for whatever reason back in the day, chose to measure these in eighths of an inch, so pretty much all of the actual bulbs themselves, of all of the different systems when you're talking about a measurement size, they're actually referred to in eighths of an inch. Same thing would be true with the HADs and fluorescents and all of that. Great thing: fast, easily dimmable, they're cheap to make especially because we have so many decades and decades and decades of experience making them. There's a lot of variety of different sizes, so like amounts of light that you can get. I can get a 20 watt bulb, I can get a 150 watt bulb. I can get all these different sizes. There are huge numbers of options available. So that's what really great about them. The downside is that, as I said, they just produce so much excess heat, that they A) can be dangerous, but also mostly they're just wasteful. The place where that's really awesome is if you happen to have an Easy Bake oven. You just put the little lightbulb in there and it produces so much heat you can actually bake cookies with it.

That was a logical, smart way to deal with these issues because there was a little bit of mercury in these things and so when you'd break one it was always kind of a big deal because it was, like, mercury in there, and it's going to get out and potentially be a dangerous toxic chemical for people. You don't wanna really touch mercury. It will penetrate through your skin.

As I go up to my car, I start to put the key in and realize, "Wait, it's not my car," because it's fairly low light by the time we figured out but then it may not even be the right color of a car because the sort of color rendering of those lights is so bad that it starts to look between black, yellow, and red, start all kind of looking the same and that it can really be an issue in certain situations. Now, most of the time it doesn't really matter that much for the situations that we're using them for, for a parking lot. You'll find your car.

So, there's certain issues, there's certain things still being kind of figured out, but they definitely have already kind of taken over the world, and they're replacing the big, long tube fluorescent lights; they're replacing the point source incandescents and CFLs; they're replacing a lot of elements that used to be sort of more like furnishings and things like that where instead of having two separate things, they're actually getting built in together. They're getting used in appliances, because, like I said, they don't produce a lot of heat, so you can put it into a refrigerator, for example, and not have an incandescent bulb generating heat in a thing you're trying to make refrigeration with. So, they're showing up everywhere, and all the different issues are being challenged in terms of, you know, where should the lights go, how should you use them, what's the system for how you kind of replace them.

This is the organic LEDs, and this is a setup that's very similar in concept to regular LED if you remember regular LED has the little diode system, got a little solid state element and it's got electrical connection on one end and an electrical connection on the other, and so the power sort of goes through it when the diode gets the power going through, that's what it's giving off the light, but for the OLEDs, instead of it being in this very simple straightforward almost like a wire connection and then this little moment in between that has the diode in it, it's done in these layers so I might have a layer of essentially the same as the diode and I would have potentially a layer underneath it that is the one side of this sort of electrical connection, it's like a gel that the electrical can move through, and then I would have another layer on the other side that electrical connection can move through. So I have three layers and one of them is the diode, the other two are about allowing this electrical process to happen, and then they get smashed together and so they're very thin, they're so thin that they can be rolled up. So you can have flexible materials that actually produce light.

That is meaningful in certain ways, but can be problematic in other ways, so kind of thinking about a point source versus a more elongated element or some spread out sense of light as a source of light, but also the sense of it being direct versus it being something that becomes more indirect, and that indirect light has a tendency to be a little bit more useful from an anti-glare standpoint, from a spreading the light around standpoint. The advantage of the direct light is that I get hard shadows. I get an element that is in the bright part and I get an element that is definitely not in the bright part, so I see three dimensionally better with direct light, but often, that hard light and hard shadow actually become problematic for people in terms of being able to see detail on the dark side or problems like that, so there are certain advantages to direct light.

These would actually be sort of technically task lights that come out and wash the wall but not from a recessed standpoint but in a direct task I'm lighting up the art or I'm putting light exactly on the signage, that kind of thing. So those are again task lights but in a very particular sort of format. We might have up lights which we talked about in this pendant example.

And so what people started doing was, those kinds of situations where you need to have the lights on immediately for whoever's going to be using that space, but you don't necessarily need to have the light on when there's nobody in the room, that they would put those on motion sensors so you walk into the space, the light turns on, it's on a little timer so you're using the space for whatever length of time it is, could be a closet, could be a bathroom, could be whatever you need. And then you leave and the light goes off after a certain period of time. It's a huge potential savings.

So night sky lighting is light is focused down, object oriented lighting is gonna be the sort of smart way to think about site lighting, so the path is lit, and the specific objects in the view line are lit, and that's how we understand the space at night. We understand the distance at night by seeing the sort of light play out over a sense of distance. If we're talking about interiors, we're just gonna light the space up.

Then when we get ready to go to a building, so here's our little building, we're gonna have this distribution level keep coming, it's gonna come around, and eventually we're gonna have it drop down to our building and there's gonna be another step-down transformer on the closest telephone pole. Then that element is going to drop directly to our building and it's gonna go to what's referred to as a weather head which is a little conduit where the pipe can accept the cable up into it, it has that little hook to it so it doesn't rain right inside of it. That's gonna bring it down to sort of everyday level, to kind of the ground level, but in a protected conduit.

You can't just completely change the design of a building by the time you're getting in to the CD sets, so it's really important for these kind of simple strategies of thinking about, where is the back of the building, how does the power get to the back of the building without becoming a problem? Do I have a balcony on my building, and that balcony's gonna put the people too close to that power line, so I got somebody standing on my balcony. Can they touch the power line, right?

The circuit breakers essentially do the same thing, but what they do is they have a little device in them that's also metal when it gets warmed up, its a little more complicated that this, but essentially when it gets warmed up, if there's too much power moving through it, it just folds back, and so it breaks the connection of the wire, and then when you go back and you reset it you sort of push it back down and it makes the connection again, and so the power can start running through it again. And so it's reusable and you're not having to throw it away every time somebody puts the toaster on with the coffee maker and the refrigerator all at the same time. So circuit breakers make a lot of logical sense.

When it comes to plumbing, there's a number of technical issues that we'll start to talk about in this exam, but mostly will show up in the next exam, but it's useful to talk a little bit about it, so we'll go through some of those in a minute, but there's also a lot of design issues that are related directly to plumbing, and that's really gonna be the main focus on this exam, and thinking about how the plumbing system is impacted by the design, and how the design is impacted by the plumbing system. A couple things first to mention: when we talk about plumbing, we're talking about three different systems that intertwine with each other. One of 'em is the supply pipes, so the hot and cold water that come around all over the building to get to all the fixtures that you wanna have water coming out of.

So I can turn off the water on each side and that's gonna make it so that I don't have water spilling on the floor if I'm just trying to replace the pump, or test it out, or change some filter, or something like that. So I've got the shut offs and then I'm gonna come a little deeper in the space, and I'm gonna eventually find the right spot where this is now gonna go up through my building. So that is my cold water going up through the building.

And it's gonna pull that air through and in the process of pulling that air through, that's gonna push all of that water that's in the trap out of the way. So that water in the trap gets suctioned right by once I have this big load of water coming down this pipe. So I have a huge amount of water go by, it creates this vacuum behind it.

So you don't wanna create a situation where that vent pipe is just so dead horizontal that you get that water just staying there and sitting in it, and therefore gonna start to eventually corrode and eat away at that pipe. You always wanna have it tilted so that that vent pipe is always draining back, any condensate becomes part of the waste system and drains back to the waste and right out through the sewer. So in this situation I'd be deciding well do I wanna reach back to this or am I willing to have one more penetration up through the roof that would then allow the air to come in just for that single kitchen stack?

It's just not gonna happen, so you're going to have roof drains, at least sometimes. So, really quick, thinking about this if you imagine in section, I've probably got some sort of situation where I've got a building, that building has a nice flat ceiling, but then on the roof side, it probably does something like this. I'm exaggerating a bit here to sort of make the point.

And there's reasons why the copper is great for the potable but when it comes to the waste line we're usually talking PVC if it's small enough, cast iron if it's heavier duty or required or you want the sound deadening. It could be that you'd be working with a galvanized but most people don't try to use galvanized anymore for this because it has relatively limited lifespan and it will break itself up after a little while, maybe after 30 or 40 years. Now that's a pretty long time but it's not a long time for a building, especially for something as infrastructural focused as the plumbing pipes.

We're just not gonna get the benefit out of having the steel, it's not gonna be cost effective. If I'm doing at 25 or 30 feet or 34 feet, something like that, that's gonna be a very efficient size for those steel wide flanges. That span's gonna work really well.

You're doing this just like on the wood, that's probably at 16 inches on center, could be that it's at 24 inches on center, but it would depend on the situation. 16 and 24 both divisible into 48, which means that they work on the four foot module so that plywood, drywall, bunch of other materials, can all show up in that four foot module. There are times when certain other materials actually go on a five foot module, but in general, most of the products that you'll find out in these kinds of settings will fit on that four foot module.

I'm gonna have a piece of plywood come, it's a really big thick piece of plywood, but you get the idea. And I want it to always end on a stud. So that stud, that stud, that stud.

So this sort of interesting relationship between post and beam, then to balloon framing, then to platform framing, it's really sort of weirdly the story of America. So not to overstate it, but it is a really interesting aspect to how the development of the country happened, and the way that expertise got used in that. I don't know that they would ask you a direct question about it.

When we're talking about steel, our typical steel spans for structural steel gonna be in that 25 foot to say 35 foot. Might be as low as 20 feet, fairly reasonably, might be as high as 40 or even 45 feet for kind of typical medium spans, but, kind of 30 foot, 35 foot, somewhere in that range. That's a pretty useful span for steel, it's gonna capture a lot of the efficiencies of steel without having too much extra material in there.

So I have these really big thick masonry structures here in order to have this larger building, this is many stories tall, 10 or 15 stories tall, and these walls get down to a spot where some portions are about six feet thick, and in fact in some places it gets even thicker than that. Well that's just kind of ridiculous. It's just impossible when you start going up higher and higher, have more and more loads, that scale of the thickness of that bearing wall just becomes untenable.

It's called engineered wood because I'm using plywood, which is not like just a regular chunk of wood. It's actually individual plies and then layered up. The top chunk of wood and the bottom chunk, which would technically be called chords, the top chord and the bottom chord can either be just literally a piece of wood, like a two by two or a two by three, something like that, or it can also be made out of those little ply elements.

So there are places where this sort of solid structural steel verus these open-web things make sense and there's places where the open-webs really sort of jump out, and the solid steel is too heavy, it's too much, we don't need it and so we go with these other ones. In both cases, I'm gonna be very concerned about fire protection. And the classic way that we do fire protection is gonna be through drywall, which just means that you're wrapping columns and beams in either one layer of drywall for one hour protection, two layers of drywall for two hour protection.

It's not that you can't do steel in a concrete city, it's just that the labor force is all set up for the concrete, so you're doing steel, there's just not gonna be a lot of welders around, so it's gonna be more expensive per square foot. So, the idea of there being a local economy that leads you one way or the other is sort of an important thought. And one of the roles that you would play in the sort of planning process is you would be talking this through with engineers, with the owner, with the various other people involved to sort of decide, well, what is the logical choice in this situation?

So the flat slab is set up where we have a column capital or possibly what's referred to as a drop panel which is that idea where there's just a little flat panel that doesn't have the angle like the other one but it again provides that opportunity to be able to get that rebar to be able to go a little bit easier angle to have more room to get that stuff through. So in both of these cases, with the column capital or with the drop panel, or, for that matter with a combination drop panel and column capital which happens quite often these are going to be much stronger and be able to have a lot more load pushing down on these floors, so these are more like industrial-type floors, things you might have a lot of big, heavy equipment on. You might be having forklifts or things like that kind of driving around, just like that big, heavy equipment.

In the case of the joist slab, you would end up with these openings that look kind of like this, And the reason that we have those little tapers, is so that we have enough room to get enough of the rebar to be able to go down through these big, long elements that you need just that little bit of extra room to be able to make that go by, because we have a lot more structure going through each one. The whole point about the waffle slab is everything is going in two directions, so each direction of each little piece is actually lower in importance. In this one, there's fewer directions, there's fewer numbers of these joists, therefore each one is more important.

It's very difficult to do that kind of thing in a site cast setting, 'cause there's just too many things going on, and it's, this, it's, you're seeing inside the form work, and it's just hard to do, but in a factory setting, where we're doing a repetitive moment, we're doing the same piece over and over again, you have the time to really get that form work right. And the positive part there is, I can get the form work right, I can make it do exactly what I want. The negative piece is that once I set that up, I've put a lot of time and energy into making that form work for this particular piece, and so, I'm gonna want to just use the same one over and over again.

We group them together 'cause they're both concrete, but they really are separate systems, and they're gonna be separate from a transportation standpoint, and the way that the transportation is working. They're gonna be separate from a staging standpoint. How much space and time I need something to be done on the site.

What we just said was more depth means more stiffness, it's gonna be able to span farther. It's gonna be able to take more load. And it now has these actually kind of interesting looking hexagon holes in it and so it has a sort of architectural look, which could be kind of fun from a distance, and you see up at a gymnasium or something, we can see a whole bunch of these all on a row.

So we have a big long depth of material because we're essentially all open it's not like a wide flange where we have the steel going the full depth and therefore I'm using a lot of steel to get any depth at all and so therefore I'm usually trying to keep it down a bit because I don't wanna spend all the money and all that steel but we know that more depth is gonna give us more stiffness and more spanning capacity. The depth of the member is the thing that is the sort of most telling. That and the fact that it's steel and not Jell-O or something, right?

When we look up a little more closely, sort of imagine the edge, the edge is gonna look something like, and it's different, like, there's different proprietary systems, so I'm not gonna get too deep into it. But, you know, there's our concrete. There's the top steel.

They're gonna pull inward, it's gonna put the concrete into compression. Then, that whole thing now is functioning. The whole time, we've had four more holding it up in place so it didn't need to be able to span.

But with site cast, I'm creating the form work in place for each one, each time anyway, so it doesn't really matter if I'm changing it a little bit on each different beam for example. So if the situation is calling for customization, well then site cast is gonna be the thing that drives the day. There's a whole series of these different issues that you can imagine are partly about the plan of the building, partly about the project delivery system, partly about the sort of general nature of the way a project's gonna move forward.

Tensile structures tend to have, you know, large kind of concrete structures that when will have tendons that will hold up these little spine moments so you get big, heavy structures, but only in one location, and then the large spans end up being with softer flexible materials and it's just through the gravity loading that allows these things to span and stretch and stretch over and make a covering over a large space. And there's a number of very, very good examples of these, and the whole point here is the reason this little thing is leaning away is that you're trying to sort of pull those things into tension. So you're pulling it so that you're stretching the material so it wants to stay in a nice, taut form.

Candela and Nervi both did really fascinating thin shell structures and interesting long span concrete structures. They're beautiful and amazing and very, very cool. Calatrava has done a number of fascinating ones, another person that would be worth mentioning in this same category.

So that's one more example about when we make a decision about the fact that there's going to be a fire suppression system because the population is vulnerable or it's a big building or it's assembly, whatever it is, so we make that decision we have to also leave space for not just the sprinkler pipes and not just the sprinkler heads and not just for wall washing a glass wall or a window in a rated wall, not just for all of that but for the pump itself. So there's gotta be some place that this great big pump can live and be maintained so that it's always on the ready. Sometimes you're gonna be required to have two fire pumps.

So generally, over the last 30 years or so, most cities have seen all those big old tanks starting to go away or empty out, so they might be still sitting there, but they're probably not using them anymore and they're now going to these more straightforward systems of having, instead of a big tank up on the roof, having a big fire pump room in the basement with a big fire pump in it, possibly a booster pump for the potable water as well, and finding ways to pressurize that system instead of from the tank, they're doing it through the pumps. The obvious problem with that, and the reason that I have a very fond feeling towards those tanks is there's something really beautiful about the idea that these tanks can pressurize these systems off of such a low tech simple way. And you imagine in an emergency, what's the first thing that's gonna go?

There's another sort of important concept which is the idea of the live sound versus the dead sound. So the example that sort of everybody understands from this is, I sound brilliant when I'm singing in the shower. I bet you do too.

You might have a situation where I have one house, and the second floor is part of the same house, as the first floor, so it'd be nice to deaden the sound between those spaces, in case I have somebody sleeping on the second floor and people having a dinner party on the first floor or something, but at least it's the same house, you have sort of more control over the situation, but if I live in an apartment building, or an old loft building that's been turned into apartments, and I have one set of units on one floor and a different set of units on another, that sound transmission, either through the impact, or just the regular sound transmission moving from one space to another, that's a big deal, right, that's peoples' lived getting interrupted, because these people may work at night, and these people work during the day, and they're moving around at the wrong times for each other, like how do you deal with that as an architect? How do you make that sort of livable for everybody, what are the sort of planning aspects that you would need to start thinking about? So, understanding the program and how the program would be impacted by these acoustic situations, and then understanding how we start to define the specifics of these acoustic situations, would be kind of what we're talking about here, so we're using the STC ratings, we're using the NRC ratings to sort of make sort of decisions about kind of what assemblies we're thinking about, and sort of the general way we're kind of approaching this, but we're also thinking about, you know, what is the space?

If I'm in a situation where the elevator's really only used some of the time, it goes a couple of floors, people use it just to kind of occasionally be able to move stuff or somebody is in a wheelchair, they need to be able to get to the 2nd floor, or something like that, the fact that it takes a little while for that elevator to get there, it's really not gonna be that big a deal. Nobody's gonna be complaining in that situation. But in other situations, they will be.

Do we need to think about how the alarm systems and the emergency lights are gonna sort of place themselves. So you're sort of getting ready for all of those decisions. And all of those decisions will, in the end, be more of a CD set of a decisions, but you would want to know during that design development phase, that planning phase, you would want to know that sort of gist of how you were gonna be approaching this as an issue.

It's gonna impact chases moving through the building, all of those different things will start to be touched, if you're gonna to have those kinds of elements being put onto one of your buildings. But, like I said mostly these are secondary considerations from a planning standpoint that become very important in the next phase when we start getting into the detailing stand.

But right here, we're talking about what are our basic sets of choices, and how do those things get impacted by all of these different issues into the wall assemblies and the floor assemblies. Obviously there's going to be a bunch of issues that we need to sort of, run through when we start thinking about every one of our wall assemblies. Obviously, if it's an exterior space, one of the first things we're going to be imagining is, does it need to shed water?

So exterior wall means one thing, bearing system, bearing wall means another thing, partition means another thing. They're all very similar, but they have pretty dramatic differences in impact when you use those terms. So if you have a question and the question is talking about a partition your assumption would be to be looking for are we talking about a fire rated partition?

And many of the same issues will impact our choices on the floor assemblies, but there's a couple of points that are worth mentioning that are specifically important for floor assemblies, there, little bit maybe less important for wall assemblies but have this sort of specific standing when it comes to the floors. One is, the idea of durability. Durability for a floor system is dramatically more important, than durability for really, anything else.

Well, right off the bat what we're realizing is we have at least two different wall assembly systems before we've even starting thinking about it, so it's probably four or five different wall assembly systems, but right now we're thinking about these two, the bearing wall system that is a masonry system and then this curtain wall system that is glass and aluminum presumably or something like that that is mostly a glass system to make a special zone. So what would we be worried about? Well, one thing we'd be worried about is how do they mix together?

So, as we've been talking about, during the planning phases of a project, we're mostly concerned about the floor assemblies and the wall assemblies, things that are gonna be really important from both an aesthetic standpoint but also from a kind of Egress and fire separation standpoint. And kind of just understanding the gist of how the system is gonna work all together. Like, what kind of structural system do we have, how does that impact the wall assembly systems, what kind of wall assembly systems do we have and how does that impact the structural systems.

So that might be a way to think about it, but now I still have to think about all right, that sound now is going to go up and then bounce from deeper up and into that space. And I might get a little bit of dulling of that sound because of the nature of that grid in the place, but will be it be enough? If this is a concrete surface, that's going to be a very hard bounce of the sound.

When you start thinking about the wall assemblies because that's one of the main things we're doing at the planning phase is we're figuring out how all the separations work so that we know that, you know, one area is gonna be enclosed in a bunch of two hour walls and another area is gonna be enclosed in a bunch of one hour walls and I've got some stair wells and I've got some corridors and I've got these other things that, like that's one of the key ideas of planning because I need to know that stuff in order to really be able to understand, well, can I have somebody on one side of that wall easily walk through to the other side? Or do they have to go through a closed door system? Can I have windows between those?

So if you imagine just as an example, wall assemblies, if we're thinking about wall assemblies under design, bid, build, well that's what we've been talking about so far, that's the way you sort of have an idea of how the plan's gonna work and compare it to the program, you start thinking about fire separations and all those different processes and then you start thinking about the uses of the different spaces and one of the impact from fire separations, from the uses, from how we're gonna tie it into the structure, all of those things get impacted back and forth and we're gonna start to sort of have normal sort of architectural sets of discussions, that will then eventually lead into detailing, so that's under the design, bid, build, which is sort of the typical way, the sort of classic way that you would deliver a project. Under design build, it's gonna be potentially slightly different because there will be different drivers of the process, under design, bid, build, there's a whole set of conversations that are happening back and forth between the architect and the owner. Under design build, you might have those conversations, but contractually you don't necessarily have to.

They are a little looser about that so you might get a little bit of the kind of design thinking moving over to the CD exam but that basic sense is, we're in the middle of design development and so those are the things that we're really focused on here. Later on, in the CA sense, we're really just making sure that the actual work that's happening is holding true to the design intent. We're making sure that the original program is still being honored, so that you're having the right level of finish and the right type of space.

Sometimes you want people to shelter in place partly because there maybe other dangers but also just because the sheer fact of being in a panic and running out of the building, you're likely to do something that's gonna hurt somebody. You're gonna trip. You're gonna knock somebody else.

So we've designed a floor plan like we're at that sort of first level of design development, we have a plan, we've started with the bubble diagram and we started into a schematic design, and then now we're actually moving that into an actual plan, but we have to go back and make sure that it's still meets the egress, that there's still two ways out for everybody at least and that the distances still match to our code review. So we're going back and checking all of that. Similarly, we're also going back and looking at the program.

Another way that I might start to think about it is, I might put some sort of big smoke evacuator system up there, that's just going to pull all the smoke, if those alarms start going off, it's just gonna pull all of the smoke right up there, and then just jettison it out to the night sky, or whatever. So that's one possibility, but if you start thinking about it, there's a bunch of problems with that. If I am just pulling that smoke up to be jettisoned out, well, something's gonna replace that, the smoke, I can't just pull smoke out, it's gonna actually force air to come in through whatever means it can.

So, a couple different levels of thinking, all the way from just being this kind of creating community aspect of visitable, to sort of building in the infrastructure, but putting off the final finishes in order to accommodate the specific users who are there right now, that would be adaptable, meeting the actual code, that is accessible, and then that more optimistic sense of universal design, just trying to make something that works for as many people as possible.

You saw people in bikes, kids, and people like that, who aren't really supposed to be using the sidewalk, but maybe they're going up just to be able to park their bike and go to the shop, or something like that. So a huge array of people end up using the curb cuts. So we thought of it, originally, as something that we were doing, y'know, to help the poor people in wheelchairs, this kind of condescending kind of way of thinking about it, but in fact, what we were really doing is we were saying, y'know, this is actually a useful thing for everybody.

The implication here is either it's going to drain far enough over that it can then be shed off the side of the building or more likely it's going to drain to a spot that's gonna have a roof drain, and that's gonna drain back up and then maybe it drains back down, then et cetera. It'll do that over and over again until you get to the full size of the building. This thought, the fact of that needing to be able to drain and get to that roof drain implies, we've talked about this a little bit already but now we're at a spot where we're making these final decisions.

Maybe the idea of trying to do a full roof over one space is just, that's just, that's just too big a roof. It just doesn't look right. Right so, what we're saying here is, yeah there are times when we just make these decisions that we know are problems.

Obviously, as we've been looking at the plans and options and going through from somatic design and looking at the programming and eventually getting into design development, we're clearly gonna see a lot of different potential options, were gonna see a lot of different issues, we're gonna talk about utilities and how they relate to the systems, we're gonna talk about structural systems, we're gonna talk about materiality, all of these things are gonna be impacting our choices when we start making these final design decisions. We've talked about some of those from the exterior in terms of the elevations and the roof plains, we've talked about some issues from the plans and from a sectional standpoint. Well, this is sort of getting a little deeper into it from that standpoint.

So, the fact that we said we're gonna follow the principles of passive design and we happen to be talking about, in this case, convective currents, it's dramatically changing our floor plan. We're gonna move away from this example, and we're gonna start finding these other possibilities. Because if we wanna do that, we need to find a way to make it work, and that's gonna be through the planning process.

So the thing to say here is really just that when there's a special element, we have to sort of understand that it has ripples into the design planning process, and that those ripples ripple through all of the normal things, but they're rippling because of this special idea. I don't know exactly how they're gonna ask you questions about this. I would imagine that they will propose some scenario, and that you would need to be able to understand that, alright if there is this scenario, then that's gonna affect my exterior wall in this way, or that's gonna affect my section in this way.

Environmental concerns will be partly about sort of engaging the environment, like what kinds of issues you want to sort of understand about the environment and how that's going to impact your building. And it's gonna be partly about sustainability issues. We might be thinking about the environment from a standpoint of can we generate energy?

All right, we're gonna have both a radiant system along the perimeter as well as a sort of standard forced-air system in the main body of the space. So that means, sectionally, there's a couple different things that could be happening, but let's say we've got some structure up there and we've got our dropped ceiling right about there. And we're gonna have our supply duct above that ceiling.

What are all the different pieces that we have to add together in order to understand what a life cycle cost number is, so that when we're comparing that vinyl siding to the wood siding, we're comparing more realistically and it may well be that the cheaper vinyls siding, if we look at it over a span of 30 or 40 years may actually be more expensive. It may make more sense to spend more money up front to have a better quality material that will then last a longer time as long as we maintain it right, as long as we build in the cost of maintenance in that comparison. And we can then understand is this the right choice.

The reason that we're talking about it here is that if you're talking about value engineering at the end of the CD sets. So in other words, for end car purposes at the end of the next exam. That's too late, it's difficult to do there.

So, guesstimate is referring to the idea of, yeah, I've got some pretty good idea of what these numbers are gonna be, it's based on a comparison or it's based on a square footage cost and we're saying, yeah, it'll be about that number. Right, that's clearly not saying this is the actual number. But by the time we get to design development we typically want to be more in control of the numbers by then.

Under design build, we're trying to make sure that as a company we're not spending, we're not proposing a building that is more expensive than what we've contracted for because if we do we're gonna spend that money building it and we're not gonna get paid any more money than what we made the contract for. So in design-bid-build, it's about the discussion, it's about the budget, it's about making sure you're tying that in with the client's needs. In design build it's about value engineering and controlling costs.

We could break it down any number of different ways, but when we do that, we're going to be thinking about all of these different issues and then trying to figure out what the budget impact of those different issues are given the fact that we've started a process. So once we start a process like an assemblies estimate, once we have that going, now we're able to start thinking about, alright, given that, given our set of assumptions, is there something that we would want to do differently in this location? Do we want to try to save money there?

Can you just use the cost estimate if it's the same size, same scope, things are really similar? Why not just use that cost estimate or the actual cost that you had and bring that over to San Jose and just start using that as your number? Well, what this is getting at is that idea that we have location factors.