FILE THIS UNDER SECTION 01 50 00 – TEMPORARY FACILITIES AND CONTROLS

My son Jerry and I came across this portable toilet in Chicago last summer.

Whoever picked the name for this company is a marketing genius.

Photo by Jerry O’Neil

THE SPEC WRITER SONG

News Item:  Apple announced Tuesday that the music of The Beatles will now be available from Apple’s on-line iTunes Store.

Yesterday I happened to hear the Beatles’ 1966 recording of “Paperback Writer”.  Now I can’t get the tune out of my head. 

I’ve always liked the song, but I can’t really identify with the aspirations of a paperback writer.

So I think it’s high time someone wrote a song about spec writers.

Proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that I’m better at prose than poetry, here’s my attempt.  My apologies to songwriters and poets everywhere.  (Sing to the tune of the Beatles’  “Paperback Writer”).

I’m a spec writer (I’m a spec writer)

Dear Sir or Madam, will you bid my book?

It took me weeks to write, will you take a look?

It’s based on MasterFormat, so don’t treat me like a doormat.

And I need a bid, cuz I’m a spec writer.

I’m a spec writer.

It’s the sad story of an under funded job.

And an indecisive owner that’s in too big a hurry.

Of addenda thus we’ll have a flurry.

But don’t you worry.

I’m a spec writer.

I’m a spec writer (I’m a spec writer)

It’s a thousand pages, and of volumes two.

I’ll be writing an addendum in a week or two.

I can make it longer, do you want to go to trial.

I can change the font from Courier to Arial.

I’m a spec writer.

I’m a spec writer (I’m a spec writer)

If you like my book you can give me a bid.

I’ll assume that read it thoroughly you did.

You realize it’s LEED.

So don’t underbid, I plead.

I’m a spec writer.

I’m a spec writer (I’m a spec writer)

For architects and engineers I have to be clairvoyant.

To the contractor I’m just an annoyance.

Soon the bids are due.

Only after that you sue.

I’m a spec writer.

            I’m a spec writer (I’m a spec writer)

            This book is all about the Work.

            And written by a team of dorks.

            Just don’t ask me for a change order.

            Cuz I really said it right, sorta.

            I’m a spec writer.

            I’m a spec writer (I’m a spec writer).

            Don’t dare front-load the job.

            Or extra retainage I’ll lob.

            Meet all requirements at closeout.

            Or the quality of Work I’ll doubt.

            I’m a spec writer.

FASCINATED BY CHAOS

George Soros says he is “…fascinated by chaos. That’s really how I make my money: understanding the revolutionary process in financial markets.”

Some time ago I ran across this quote in an article about George Soros, the controversial billionaire investor. Mr. Soros has been financially successful in understanding and exploiting chaos and change in the world’s financial marketplace.

It occurred to me that the AEC industry, in which I’ve been immersed for over forty years as an architect and specifier, and which I’ve always found fascinating, is even more fascinating now because it's currently in chaos.

Several major waves of change are rolling through the industry, and combined, their effect is the business equivalent of a tsunami.

A few examples:
• CAD to BIM Transition: Although slowed by the economic downturn, the transition from producing construction contract documents using CAD-and-word-processed-specs to BIM-and-linked-specs will eventually pick up speed. Spec writers will have to learn how to work with BIM, and to some extent BIM users will have to become de facto spec writers. This will eventually result in better contract documents because BIM will impose some much-needed rigor and consistency in the terminology we use. But the transition will be an adventure for all concerned.
• Conditions of the Contract: The decades-long dominance of the AIA and EJCDC contract documents is being challenged by AGC's new "Consensus Documents" (Consensusdocs). The AGC had a series of contract documents before, of course, but now the coalition they're leading is aggressively promoting their new family of documents by drawing all kinds of organizations, including CSI, into "endorsement" of their documents, whatever that means. The AIA and EJCDC documents primarily reflect the interests of AEs and owners, and Consensusdocs presumably place primacy on the interests of builders. I predict a steep learning curve for AEs working on projects with Consensusdocs, plus some real challenges for the authors of any future updates to the CSI Project Resource Manual / Manual of Practice which has been based since its first edition many years ago on the AIA/EJCDC documents. (Here’s something for you irony fans out there to savor: The AGC withdrew from the long-established industry consensus around the AIA documents, and then named their documents "Consensusdocs".)
• Green Building Issues and Goals: Consider the effect on the AEC industry of LEED, upgraded energy codes, the ambitious goals of the AIA’s 2030 Challenge, etc. The result is an increasingly complex matrix of design considerations, and more liability for AEs. Determining all the regs that apply to a new project is already much more complicated than the traditional code search, and it’s going to get even trickier in the next few years.
• Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) blurs and redefines the traditional responsibilities of building owners, designers, and builders. Though IPD was conceived with the noble goal of reducing the wasteful and adversarial behavior of the players, the business consequences of its use, especially involving shared responsibility for the “model”, are only just beginning to emerge.
• Paperless, Cloud-based Construction Administration Tools: Lots of potential to do things better and more efficiently; probably lots of new ways to make mistakes, too.
• The economic downturn itself is suppressing project design and construction and idling thousands of persons in all parts of the AEC industry. A significant percentage of members of our CSI chapter have had serious interruptions in employment since the downturn started the pain in 2008.

If this doesn’t add up to a chaotic and revolutionary situation, I don't know what does.

I just wish I could figure out how to straighten out some of this chaos.

And make billions.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Petit Memorial Chapel

As Ralph Liebing has pointed out in his Per-SPEC-tives articles which appear in CSI chapter newsletters, most spec writers didn't enter the design professions with the intention of writing construction specifications.

I certainly didn't.  I wanted to be a designer.  My fascination with the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe motivated me to go to IIT’s architectural school in Chicago.

After I started working in an AE firm, I was deployed pretty much exclusively as a drafter and detailer (the old-fashioned kind of drafting, long before CAD).  My attempts to get assigned to design work were unsuccessful.  Then the late Bill Lohmann offered me a job as a spec writer.  I accepted his offer.   I’m glad I did and I can honestly say that in 37 years as a specifier I've never had a boring day.

Anyway, yesterday I came across a building that reminded me why it's a good thing for the world that I became a wordsmith instead of a building designer. 

The building is Frank Lloyd Wright's Petit Memorial Chapel.  It sits in a cemetery in Belvidere, Illinois and was built in 1907.

I could never have designed anything this good.  I do a pretty good job arranging words, but as an architect I could never have achieved the degree of focus, elegance, and simplicity that Frank Lloyd Wright did with this building.

I find most of Wright's buildings breathtaking, but this one is special because it's so pure, so cerebral, and so refined.  Compared to most of the eclectic crap that was being built in 1907, this must have stood out like a spaceship from mars.

The photographs I'm attaching barely hint at the zen-like purity of this little building.  If you get the chance, go see it for yourself.

BTW, if someone offers you a job as a spec writer, I’d advise you to jump on it.  If you get lucky, you could be in the vanguard of the long-awaited integration of specs and BIM.  

Why Is The Project Manual So Big?

“Do you spec writers get paid by the pound?”

Sooner or later, on almost every construction project, somebody in a meeting comments on the size of the project spec, to general guffaws all around.  Each participant tries to outdo the other in displaying a dismissive attitude toward construction specs.

Then, within a few days, someone locates and distributes a grainy tenth-generation photocopy of that seventies-era cartoon showing a construction-site outhouse with a speech balloon saying “Damn!  We’re out of specs.”

But the minute that any of the actors in a construction project need support for a position they’re taking, where do they look?

The spec. 

If the spec has information that settles the issue, everything’s fine.  But if the answer can’t be found in the spec, the spec writer puts on his or her thinking cap and wordsmiths something to make the documents better on the next project.

That’s why the spec book is so big. We spec writers get a lot of feedback.  And we’re driven by the need to strive for a loophole-proof set of construction documents.

The inevitable result of such feedback is more words and more pages in the Project Manual. 

Ultimately, though, we’ve got about as much chance of eliminating contract document document loopholes as the IRS has of eliminating tax law loopholes. Why? 

• Numero Uno, The Last War Syndrome:  No two projects are really the same, and the solution to the last project’s problem may not quite cut it for the current project.  Frequent criticism of the military is that they’re always fighting the last war.  Same thing for spec writers and loopholes.
• Numero Two-o, Contractor Attitude:  No two projects have the same cast of characters.  Project A’s contractor may be super-cooperative and dedicated to really satisfying the owner and getting continuing business.  Project B’s contractor may have bid the job low, always intending to make up the difference on change orders, in which case even a good set of contract documents will be under constant attack.  Contractor B might challenge provisions in the documents that contractor A would accept without question.
• Numero-Three-o, BIM!:  Whenever we emerge from this ghastly depression, BIM usage will take off like a rocket.  As entranced as I am with the idea of BIM and it’s possibilities for improving AE/spec writer productivity and document coordination, contractors will certainly find ways of exploiting information in the BIM model for all kinds of embarrassing change orders. Which leads me to…
• Numero-Four-o, Contractor Creativity:  The loophole-exploiting creativity of contractors, like that of tax lawyers, seems to be boundless.

Even though it’s a never-ending task, eliminating contract document loopholes remains an ideal we have to strive for, kind of like the holy grail.  Hence big spec books are here to stay.

Oh, by the way, the numero-uno, numero two-o thing.  I borrowed it from one of my favorite writers, the late Molly Ivins, who was fond of using this device for lists in her newspaper articles about Texas politics.

REVENGE OF THE NERDS?

For years I’ve carped about the shallowness and triviality of TV news and the human interest pieces they air rather than telling us what’s really happening in the world.

Imagine my surprise when I found myself liking one of Jeanne Moos’ goofy little stories on CNN the other day.  It was an amusing story about Peter Orszag, the White House Budget irector. 

Although the story was typical TV dreck, I found it weirdly heartening, not for anything Mr. Orszag is doing in connection with the budget, but for it’s possible implications for the reputations of spec writers.

The gist of Jeanne Moos’ story was that Mr. Orszag, who is reputed to be a brilliant economist but who bears a striking resemblance to some of the characters in the 1984 movie “Revenge of the Nerds”, has somehow finally succeeded in making it sexy to be a nerd.   The story focused on the divorced Mr. Orszag’s romantic entanglements and the fact that he was apparently considered to be one of Washington’s most eligible bachelors until he recently announced he would marry again.

So if the nerdy Mr. Orszag is considered sexy, can spec writers be far behind?  We’re the quintessential nerds, absorbed in the business of creating contract documents.  Not quite as nerdy as the algorithm-writing engineers at Google, but close.  (Full disclosure:  In college I did indeed have a pocket protector bursting with pens.  This was when I was an architecture student, even before I knew what specs were. I didn’t clip my slide rule on my belt like the engineering students, though.)

Mind you, we spec writers aren’t looking for romantic entanglements or groupies as a reward for our nerdiness, but it would be nice to get wider attention and acknowledgement for our contributions to the architecture and engineering professions.

Why I like MASTERFORMAT 2004, Numero Uno

Anecdotal reports, along with conversations in CSI gatherings seem to indicate that many architects, engineers and specifiers are lingering with the old, no-longer-supported-by-CSI, 16-division MASTERFORMAT 1995, instead of using the new (actually five years old now) 50-division MASTERFORMAT 2004.

I suppose old habits are hard to change, especially given the near-geriatric profile of CSI’s membership.  Full disclosure:  I’m getting close to this demographic myself, but I have enthusiastically embraced the use of MASTERFORMAT 2004.  I’d support MF04 anyway, just because it’s the product of the volunteer-driven consensus standard process that’s at the heart of professionalism and good professional societies. 

But here’s another reason:  It’s easier to produce HVAC, plumbing and fire protection specs with MF04 than with MF95.

Remember the interminable tussles between plumbing engineers, fire protection engineers, and HVAC engineers over the content of the so-called common requirements of the old Division 15 – Mechanical?

The various engineers could never seem to agree on what valves to include, or what insulation to include, or what pipe sizes and types to include, or what to say about painting or concrete equipment bases, or what to say about firestopping penetrations.  And on and on…

Division 15 could never be wrapped up until all three disciplines had edited the common spec sections. 

These problems were exacerbated when one or more of these engineering disciplines was contracted to an outside firm or firms.  The situation was almost hard-wired to create gaps and/or overlaps in bidding and contract documents, resulting in addendum items and change orders.

In contrast, MF 04 gives each of the three engineering disciplines their own Division, 21 for Fire Protection, 22 for Plumbing, and 23 for HVAC.  Each of these Divisions is self-contained, intended to include all of the components necessary to bid and build that work.

Thus MF 04 makes it easier for each of the three engineering disciplines to wrap up their specs.  Yes, it’s true that this means at least some redundant text in each of the three divisions, but I think it’s a small price to pay.