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Dear E,

You are probably enjoying family life on a beach somewhere, while an aunt or a grandma prepares the next delicious meal of Lamb and rice for you and the ladies. I am envious. So I send you an update from the world of architecture in Germany countryside.

We are on the edge, again - or should I say, as usual.

It all looked good until last week. We have discovered an overage of 400 thousand on a contract sum of 1.2 million - this just for the raw construction.

Our brilliant structural engineer brought me to slamming my fist on the table in our Jour Fixe two weeks ago. He implied that we were unrealistically detailing our steel to concrete connections and making everything much too expensive, although the detail we were discussing contained less than 200 kilos of steel. Previously, the same office criticized us for drawing reinforcing steel in our details. Of course I did this for more than a few reasons, including checking the 'buildable' tolerance of the pre-cast details. They were crying like little girls because I had most likely embarrassed them by illustrating what had not yet been done in their office.

Then the Project tsunami hit. The structural engineer delivered the steel calculations just two weeks before the release of the specification and bid package. We had much to coordinate, so we hadn't really had the time to look at the implications of the single-page word document that was faxed to us, but in the end we were shocked ! The steel reinforcing came in at 4 time the volume we had previously carried in our budget. This number was discussed last year with the same firm, and of course was immediately denied by the engineers. Them - "Stupid architect - you must have been using the reinforcing that you normally calculate for the basement of a single-family house!"

Me- "Fuck you."

This is paraphrasing of course. We are in Germany, not a barbaric land like the US where I would have exhausted my lexicon of curses a long time ago.

Me, Germany - "Perhaps we should refer to the telephone protocol from the 2nd of November, 2010." Translation - "Fuck you."




Me, US - "You motherless ape whore. Did you pull your head out of your ass this morning to shave, or just now so you could drink a cup of coffee ?" Translation -"I strongly disagree with my esteemed colleague."

So, we thought we had all the ammunition we needed to clear up this issue, and blame the right people, when we discovered something that was not so good.

After getting grief from C. for getting rid of our dead wood - I think it was just post partum shock - the shitty work he did in this office has come back to bite us in the ass. Of course it is our fault that we let such an idiot have anything to do with our best project, but we really thought he could take dimensions from finished plans and put together a spreadsheet.

In this project we have an entry level, a mezzanine that is half the floor area of the entry, and a roof. Three big columns, two fat columns, a dozen normal columns, and a few walls. In December, our Einstein and I sat down to check his numbers. I quickly found an error of nearly 100 K, and that was because he had entirely forgotten the acoustic ceiling in the library. What I did not check then, and it is all crystal clear now, is that if he had forgotten the ceiling, then HE FORGOT THE ENTIRE MEZZANINE.

Yes, we are missing 40 cubic meters of concrete, and all the reinforcing associated with it. So much for pushing the responsibility of cost overruns onto someone else's desk. At least now the complaints about losing our only "German-speaking architect" have been silenced. C. is now so stressed out that she is sleeping three hours a day.

Not good.

I send you this to remind you of how good you have it in Greece, and to also let you know that it is not always the architects who make shitty decisions. Sometimes the engineers help a shitty work to look even worse.

Pleas kiss the girls for the both of us.

P.B. le 11/04/2011


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