prep, I found myself at the mic, arguing in my two minutes for passage of the resolution, which was successfully adopted. And the Presidio is now a wonderful piece of San Francisco’s public open spaces. I went through the chairs and was president of AIA San Francisco in 2000 and then was elected to the executive committee as vice president for practice at the California Council. I continued to push with the practice management technical side of things, but also engaged in the other pieces, which then led to the election as regional rep for California Council on the National Board. California, having the largest number of architects in the country, had multiple seats at that time on the Board. I was the junior guy, but we also had a long tradition of a number of presidents of the Institute. Those players took me under their wing and helped me understand the bigger the stage that you have, the bigger your opportunity to influence things: rules, tax credits, legislation, as well as business opportunities. At the same time, I was also representing Gensler on the International Alliance for Interoperable Board (IAI). The IAI was focused on technology adoption in the profession, the integration in the practice of technology and the need for us to communicate across platforms, not be siloed. This opened up a whole group of software providers that I got to collaborate with. Being on the AIA National Executive Committee, I brought some things of that discussion to AIA that helped move things along. One of the more significant outcomes of the nexus between AIA and IAI came when I got a phone call from a woman who was working in the office of the chief architect for GSA: Gertraud Breitkopf, who was an architect. She explained that she was working on a committee for the Construction Users Roundtable, which is a group of big national firms that have multiple sites, multiple projects and a lot of contractor participation. They were trying to understand why architects’ and engineers’ drawings were so bad. I started to quiz her on how they knew as a committee that the documents were bad. Well, cost overruns, budget busts, schedule extensions, performance issues with materials, change orders — the usual stuff. Through the course of the conversation, I tried to figure out from her why, when these things happen, if they experience other things, like if they make a major decision to move a department that has different performance requirements across the building, how that might lead to additional cost or delays in the schedule? Or if they insisted that we use a certain material and then it failed to perform even though they told us to use it, it is still our fault. Right? I said, “Look, I don’t agree with your premise, but here’s what I can do. I can get together architects and engineers and the software guys. You can bring some owners and subcontractors together, and let’s do a little workshop.” There were about 20 people in the room, equally split between the owner/contractor side and the design/professional software side. We started going through these issues with the group. Patrick MacLeamy, FAIA, chair of HOK and chair of the International Alliance for Interoperability North American Component, did a great job of bringing brief case studies of projects they had done for governmental entities around the country. Six of them were design-bid-build, and six of them were negotiated contracts. He was able to illustrate for them the differences in terms of budget conformance, schedule conformance, performance, and all that kind of stuff. After about two or three hours, I started to see the lights go on over the contractors and the owners’ heads until, finally, one of them said, “Okay, you’re telling us that the way we’re asking you to do your work is creating outcomes we don’t want?” Yes, that is exactly the point. Out of that conversation, we came to some conclusions: The way you’re asking us to work around liability issues means that I can’t bring all my knowledge to this conversation because my practice liability insurance limits me, and you’re not trusting me in terms of these pieces of information. What contract formats and decision processes will allow us to be more engaged? And then you bring us budgets that are often unrealistic. You don’t want to modify your program to align with your budget, nor increase your budget to get your program. So, we need to have more upfront conversations about how we set the parameters for the exercise rather than just leaping in, and then we’re going to make it all work out. And at the end of the day, when we as architects succeed, you’re going to succeed as a business. And when you succeed, we succeed. The outgrowth of it was that we need to have an environment where we’re going to agree not to sue each other. The design professionals are willing to put some skin in the game. I’ll put part of my profit at risk to have a seat at the table to help determine the budget. We’re going to share information more regularly rather than a weekly project meeting. Let’s cohabitate so that I’ve got the contractor and all the engineers and you right at the table to solve a problem now, not wait for next week and lose a week’s production. That was the beginning of the Surviving Members of the Embarcadero Team (LR), Tom Lollini, FAIA, RK Stewart, FAIA, Bruce Race, FAIA, FAPA, Clark Manus, FAIA
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