Ralph Liebing, RA, CSI, CDT
Senior Member
Username: rliebing
Post Number: 1076
Registered: 02-2003
| | Posted on Wednesday, October 28, 2009 - 07:03 am: |    |
091028
WHAT OF THE FUTURE?
by Ralph Liebing, RA, CSI, CDT, Cincinnati, OH
Collectively we are all the same – yet in so many different ways! Collectively we do the same things – but in so many different ways! We come from quite varied backgrounds – some registered professionals; some trained but not registered; some from product representation; some from the many other disciples and majors. Yet we all do our prescribed work.
Our deliverables do the same things; we all well know Parts 1, 2, and 3, but we approach them and other documents, words and provisions, in varying ways. Do you select materials for your projects? Or do designers come to you for “a spec for _______________.” You do the research [?] on some products they have stumbled upon and try to work them into the scheme of the project.
But there is a rather frightening aspect to this. We don’t for the most part, detail! We don’t put the buildings together [via graphic documentation]. We document WHAT variant materials, systems, devices and equipment are to be supplied [and their attributes], but we do not document or show HOW they are to be fashioned, used, fitted, and incorporated into the project work and scheme. Who does?
It takes someone with construction knowledge and with adaptive flexibility in insight and foresight to apply, configure, fit, and implement those items into the project work – to detail just exactly how they fit together for forming the various elements and features of the design concept. Right now, we have such staff colleagues doing that, BUT what of the future? We have long decried the obvious lack of a source for future spec writers, but best we also look to see where “detailers” and those with technical construction knowledge are coming from. Odd that "designers" continue to be cranked out but few if any one with a documentation/construction mindset! Projects correctly or faithfully reflecting the design concept are NOT mystical happenings!
If you look at current college curricula you will find little technical instruction. Most of this [and generally little it is] now lays in 2-year and community college programs that produce good working staff, but at this time do not produce persons who are technically capable of following a direct path to professional registration and positions of project responsibility. So whence cometh the “real” [as in defined] architects of the future? Those fully educated and trained to permit their registration under law. We have recently seen NAAB thinking of moving to opt out of anything near a firm mandate on what professional education SHOULD entail [including training in BOTH aspects of architectural practice, “art” and “science”]. Their criteria is a gauzy, indistinct “waving” at absolutes, when we really need academic mandates for the intern programs AND for registration that has some true meaning and value! So where is that knowledge we need to complement and supplement us and which will be involved, in the future, with the graphic documentation of the design concept? Those of constructible working drawings, and not merely glitzy perspective renderings and modeling!
I have fears! Standard details may come to prevail and projects made to fit them [no new thinking required!]. Those few remaining “older” hands will at least monitor if not perform the “hand sketches” [!!!!!] of details convertible into CAD or BIM, as now. But there is a very slippery slope here, which we, collectively, cannot and should not deal with. Right? Despite excellence [!] in our work, drawings will remain a major ingredient in successful projects, PROVIDED there are personnel available to make the technical decisions regarding their content, configuration, application, interrelationships, fit, function, etc., that then can be “machined” into correct documentation of any motif.
With an obvious self-interest in this, we collectively [read “CSI”] certainly can play a meaningful part. Short of establishing a whole chain of Institutes of Construction Documentation [!], there can be a strong effort to augment, support, facilitate, assist, and promote what technical instruction there is, using CSI drawing-oriented programs and publications; and offering the “services” of CSI members to provide insight, instruction, and guidance to such efforts – simply rational, good sense and insight to successful projects, on-going!
Think “contract documents”! |
4specs.com Home Page