CHANNELING ANDY ROONEY

As an occasional watcher of the CBS TV news magazine 60 Minutes, I always enjoyed listening to Andy Rooney’s commentaries.  Andy would grumble about something or other that irked him at the end of the show in A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney.    

As a wordsmith specializing in construction documents, I see things that annoy me in the writing I review and edit.  Here are a few of my pet peeves:

Using the word luminaries (plural of luminary) when you mean luminaires (plural of luminaire). People mistake “luminaries” for the plural form of the word “luminaire”. When writing about lighting in the built environment, you need to use “luminaire” and “luminaires”, defined by Merriam-Webster as “a complete lighting unit.”  By contrast, a “luminary”, Merriam-Webster says, is “a person of prominence or brilliant achievement, or a body that gives light; especially : one of the celestial bodies.”

Leaving parentheses in text makes it look as though the text hasn't been edited or is still tentative. As in:

• “This Addendum consists of (2) pages (plus materials itemized herein).”
• “Provide (3) hard copies and (1) PDF copy.”

text in all lower case:  i see this a lot in blog posts and in comments to blog posts or news articles on the internet. i get the impression that the author feels it’s so critically important to get the ideas out of his head and into pixels that he just doesn’t have time to press the shift key to capitalize a word. i suppose this worked for e. e. cummings’ poetry.  i never understood poetry, anyway.  but it doesn’t cut the mustard for me.  see what i mean?

Cross-referenced specification sections that don’t exist in the project. Seek these references out and kill them.  All they do is confuse everybody.

“Do not use explosives”. A provision occasionally left in project earthwork specifications.  I’ve taken this out of our office master specifications. It’s totally unnecessary to say it, because almost no building projects have circumstances where anyone would even consider using explosives.  Leaving this requirement in a project specification is like admitting “I really didn’t read this spec, much less edit it.” Kablooie!

WATER TABLES

Architectural lingo is full of wonderfully colorful terms.

One of these is water table, which, if you recall, can have two completely different meanings.

If you’re talking about a water table in the sense of ground water, Wikipedia says:

The water table is the surface where the water pressure head is equal to the atmospheric pressure (where gauge pressure = 0). It may be conveniently visualized as the 'surface' of the subsurface materials that are saturated with groundwater in a given vicinity. However, saturated conditions may extend above the water table as surface tension holds water in some pores below atmospheric pressure. Individual points on the water table are typically measured as the elevation that the water rises to in a well screened in the shallow groundwater.

If you’re talking about a water table as an architectural element, Wikipedia says:

A water table is a masonry architectural feature that consists of a projecting course that deflects water running down the face of a building away from lower courses or the foundation. A water table may be found near the base of a wall or at a transition between materials, such as from stone to brick.

I love the english language. And architecture. And specification writing. No other profession offers entertainment like this without having to pay for it.

USE GOOGLE EARTH TO HELP EDIT SITE CLEARING SPECIFICATIONS

Time schedules for production of construction documents seem to be getting less generous with each passing year. It’s often necessary to start project specifications before the rest of the design team has resolved the design, let alone committed the design to paper.  Or to pixels.

A prime example of the challenges a spec writer faces in writing about things that haven’t been drawn yet is specifying site clearing (Section 31 10 00 - SITE CLEARING).  

Since site clearing, as a work result, is just the absence of site improvements that formerly occupied the building site, even a pretty decent set of site drawings of the new site improvement construction may not show all of what has to be cleared from the site.

Talk to the project design team, you say.  Well, sometimes team members are available to help scope out what’s required to be cleared from the site.  But not always.  They take vacations or spend hours in high-level do-not-interrupt meetings.  Or they may not know much about the existing site, especially if the client isn’t conscientious about keeping multiple design consultants fully informed about project requirements.

So what to do?

Google Earth may be of some assistance. Type in the project address and Google Earth will fly you to your site.

On a recent project, I got some assistance in editing Section 31 10 00 by viewing images of the site on Google Earth.  Here’s part of what I found:

• The existing site has trees that are in the footprint of the new building and must be removed.  There are no existing trees outside of the new building footprint.  So I don’t have to specify tree protection during building construction.
• There are existing sidewalks and asphalt paving which must be removed because they’re in the footprint of the new building.
• Ditto for an existing monument sign and parking lot lighting.

Google Earth isn’t perfect.  Buildings, trees, and vehicles are weirdly flattened in the aerial view, and sometimes the aerial view doesn’t agree with the associated street view.  But it’s one more tool spec writers can use to determine what to specify.