I once mailed out a rendering to a big client of ours. I had spent hours working on the rendering which was of a high rise mixed use residential/retail/hospitality project and I misspelled the name of the restaurant on the image. They called me out on it right away and it was kind of embarrassing at first but it was pretty funny all in all...
i once screwed-up the plumbing coordination resulting in a gas line being in-plane with a beam we could not penetrate. ended up using flexible stainless-steel to route the line around the obstruction. $$
i once screwed up the civil coordination of a small parking structure such that we didn't have enough headroom at grade in some spaces. i spent a very late night recalculating the grades to make it work - barely...
a project with a terribly non-responsive structural engineer had worn me down after i had constantly checked and re-checked their drawings for screw-ups and lazy interpretations of the arch drawings. the building had four equal bays with a very large amount of glazing facing west - i was so busy hounding them to fix the obvious mistakes that i never noticed that the engineer had decided to use steel wide-flanges as floor-level beams on the two interior bays and wood beams on the two exterior bays. the facade, which is regular in all respects, now has two deeper beams expressed at either end bay...real nice. thanks jerk...
i was doing steel shop drawings. it was the first project that i had been allowed to detail almost entirely by myself. i hadn't done a lot of shops so i was being extra careful. it's getting late, and i'm leaving town for the weekend. i submit the drawings, and leave the office, but i have this nagging feeling that something is wrong. finally i realize that the edge of slab does not match up in both plan and section. they're off by about 3" which will screw up the cold form metal steel shops which will screw up a canted exterior wall we have. i agonize about it all weekend.
i get back to work monday. how am i going to tell the project architect about this? i stress for a good hour then bite the bullet and tell him.
"call the contractor and resubmit the shops. you worry too much."
jafidler, i'll work with you any day of the week and twice on sunday. taking initiative, integrity and personal ownership of that particular issue speaks volumes.
i don't think i've ever made a mistake on the job. my funniest/most embarrassing moment, however, was probably when i walked into the glass door of the conference room right in front of everybody in the office. it was for a lunch-n-learn and i managed to spill my lunch all over myself. probably lucky that i didn't break my nose or something too because i hit it hard.
not the worst yet but it stressed me out at the time. i was straight out of school and a few months into my first job in an arch office doing cd's. i once forgot to draw two lines on the floor plan to indicate a tub access and the plumbers routed some pipes where the access was supposed to be. my boss comes to my office from the jobsite telling me that the plumber's will have to come back and re-route ($$$) because of my mistake.
in that case, we were able to move the access in a less ideal place slightly to one side.
lines are not just lines.
this one is non-architectural. i worked in a restaurant as a cashier/host. one of the waitresses asked me if i can bring drinks to one of her tables...guess what? i spilled the drinks all over the customers. it was my first time bringing drinks and i didn't know the techniques of tray balancing. it was embarrasing...i think i even had a huge smile walking towards the table with the tray of drinks like" hell yeah, we servin' it!"
Once I approved some shop drawings for doors in a remodel we were doing, unfortunately they were all the wrong color and did not match the existing doors. Fortunately we were able to salvage some doors from another portion of the job and fix my mistake. It still ended up being expensive in the long run.
i detailed a floating resin countertop for a corporate reception desk with sstl bade supports at 36" o.c. well, the resin wasn't thick enough to begin with, and the track lighting directly above put enough heat on the resin to make it droop 1"+ between supports. the resin was installed the night before their open house, so all their clients got to see it, it was so pathetic...
after having the casework sub screw around trying to straighten it out, we ended up putting in 3 extra supports and a new, thicker resin slab, total cost $3600, of which we had to pay $1800 since it was a 'design error.'
not a big deal in the overall scheme of things, but embarrasing from a credibility perspective. we never worked for that client again.
Not all mistakes end tragically. Some mistakes get you free food.
When I first started, I had to help engineer a two story building on a hold-down that didnt exist. I got all the numbers off some ragged looking piece of paper that was stuck to some old calculations. After that, I was told to take the simpson class and got my free breakfast and lunch buffet.
Be sure to load up on the bacon! And they give you epoxy too.
1. in the days of mylars, an intern was told to transfer the changes redlined on the prints onto the originals/mylars. as he made the changes, he was to mark that the had done them with a highlighter.
he highlighted the mylars.
2. jobsite meeting 2+ hours from town. raining. principal goes to get car, leaving intern at sidewalk to wait until car gets brought around. principal gets preoccupied and heads home, intern left on sidewalk. principal realizes some time later....
I was working in an office when I first started out where one of the associates was working on an elementary school. It was one of those
open floor plans schools with tons of cabinets for storing things. Anyhow the cabinets were scaled to fit the students heights. So he is racing thru the shop drawings and changes the heights on all of the cabinets so they are 6" shorter in height. Cabinets show up on the job and low an behold all the cabinets in the administrative work rooms are sized for first graders....so they all got shipped off to our
new office where we had steel frames built to raise them up off the floor to a workable height. They worked slick as ever because they were now furniture the partners were able to write them off for tax purposes as furniture.
i've heard them all. the transposing 2'-7" to 27" is a classic though. but, here's my mistake of the week:
we are renovating an old farmhouse/ranch for some out of towners. this farm/ranch contains several old buildings, including an old log chicken coop. my boss' idea was to use the chicken coop for the guy's new woodshop which would be attached to his garage.
in order to make sure this building would work for the wood shop, another employee and myself took a trip to the site last winter to get some quick, overall measurements. i didn't really think about it at the time, but it wasn't exactly an as-built session. we didn't even walk all the way around the building. but these became the drawings transposed to what was built last week.
so anyway, my first red flag is that, last spring when i was drawing this thing, i realized from our photos that we had two of the existing windows were flip-flopped. so i went out to verify these two windows and updated them on the plan. but stupid me didn't think to check anything else. of course it is important to note that, when using an existing building, it is important to field verify all measurement, and to my credit i definitely put this on the plan.
none-the-less, last thursday i made a visit to the site to find....the building does not fit on the foundation, which was poured over a month ago. the rest of the garage building is almost completely framed in. somewhere either myself or the other employee read the tape wrong, or something i don't know. but the foundation is 10" longer than the log building. it is an easy fix, but there will for ever be a big ass shelf on one end, and i will have to speak to the client on monday who will surely be pissed. i can't pass the buck to the builder on this one, but like i said, we did have 'field verify' on our dim string and he definitely didn't check anything.
A small tangent, How do various offices deal with their mistakes?
I know my office has stricken a few checks to some pissed off clients in the past. Not just crediting hours for working out problems, but actully paying for change orders.
It seems like a scary door for an architect to open.
that's a good one le bossman. i had a similar experience on a resid remodel.
it was my first project at the office and they handed me the unfinished design and nearly finished cd's to complete. it was a complicated stepped conc patio with planters and benches posts imbedded into walls and stone inlays and all kinds of funky things that we intricately layed out. the whole thing was to be poured in between the existing house and some existing steps, and the dimensions on the asbuilts were off by 3'...and the patio was only 12' wide. the contractor calls me with the concrete guy there about to pour. they poured that day and we all made it work.
in the end the redesign was better than the original. it took a while to get all the fallen dominoes back into some configuration...like the ongoing design build project that you thought was completely figured out before construction. it was an easy going project and the clients were a dream so there was no screaming involved and everyone was happy at the end. yay
sometimes you eat your mistakes, other times you charge for them. it depends on how far along you are in the process, whose fault it was, and what it affects. also, all businesses understand that, like it or not, you don't make money on every job. mistakes are completely unavoidable. sooner or later, they will happen.
I didn't detail any wrap on some metal framed decorative piers over an existing concrete landscape wall. Finished the piers with stucco, they looked great. I went back about 2 years later and they are dripping with rust... To top it off, the existing structure was really old, and had nasty maintenance issues - there had been rust everywhere leaking out of the concrete walls and the maintenace plan had been to paint EVERYTHING rust colored to hide it. The client was VERY sensitive to the issue of rust (and the color of rust actually) and our job was to do the facelift, hiding this RUSTY mess...
Otherwise, what I lack in doosies, I make up for in sheer quantity. of mistakes.
do you think these mistakes can be somewhat deterred by the implementation of new programs like revit?
i haven't used the program, but the concept of a 3-d design process through one program seems to streamline some of the work and [hopefully] reduces mistakes.
I had an interesting discussion with an engineer once about the promise and peril of programs like Revit. A he specifically warned of a lack of redundancy. Basically that the engineer (or architect) would take what the computer said at face value, whereas in days of yore it used to take teams of engineers years to engineer the most complicated structures, it now takes on man with a computer and 3 weeks. Without that team of engineers to check his work, there's no redundancy and the chance of a mistake could actually increase as a computer is only as smart as its operator. This was a relatively young guy working at Arup by the way.
Speaking personally though, my worst mistake was working on the wrong scale for weeks, before somebody noticed. Everything but the detailing was about 12% too small.
As of today I own two beautiful light fixtures with hand block printed silk shades by Galbraith and Paul. I thought I was requesting an invoice, but I was actually requesting the order be placed - oops! Problem is they won't be needed for another 8 months, and it's not clear whether their cost will be included in the owner's or the tenant's (my client) budget, so neither party is willing to pay for them until that negotiation is finalized. Since G&P is a small company who I respect enormously, I went ahead and bought the fixtures and will store them until they are needed.
Most likely I won't be reimbursed for the credit card interest that builds up on them during the next eight months, and if the project tanks, well, I can probably ebay them?
Not my own mistake, but a friend's: Having a legally bought version of CAD-software lying in a drawer while still working with an illegal one that was already installed - out of pure laziness. The lawyers didn't care about the legal one. Cost him a fortune and nearly ruined his freshly founded office.
It happened when I created a schedule for some windows and not double checking the roughs. Only later to have the framing sub have a major fit. All I could say was "contractor is responsible to field verify all dimensions"
Once I had steel beam sized to carry a large portion of a new second story addition. It was real heavy and about 20 feet long. It had to be threaded in, over and above an existing ceiling and rest on a wall twenty feet away from the end they could access . There was very little room to work. I had ordered the beam and had it brought to the site. The contractor was using a much undersized tractor to place the behemoth. A real scary site. After about 4 hours of wrangling this thing into place and the contractor almost killing himself they find out the beam is a foot too short... OOPs
Don't know how many times a sub would show up on the job site with a set of bid plans from a couple of months earlier and the job looked nothing like the old preliminary bid plans.
I learned alot from those "close calls"
Lots and lots of field measurements
double check your double checks
notes on drawings to make the general contractor knows he's responsible for updating all the subs with the most up-to-date plans
Don't know how many times a sub would show up on the job site with a set of bid plans from a couple of months earlier and the job looked nothing like the old preliminary bid plans.
Oh man that has happened so so often. Actually I can't think of a single job where that didn't happen with at least 1 sub. Hmm.
try this one on for size. The scourge of my thus far short career, three little letters... N.I.C. This is my first "big" mistake.
We don't touch parking shade structures in our office. We locate, that is it. And, it is specifically in our contracts as such. So I labelled my keynotes, "Parking shade structure, N.I.C."... Well, I now know that "C" does mean contract, but not our (the architect's) contract. Long story short, contractor did not include parking structures into the contract. Came up during a CA meeting, and I spent the next 2 hours being screamed at in front of about 10 people by the owner. When the dust settled and the COR was submitted the total damage was around $96,000... that one stung a little. But, I still have my job.
The office hasn't had had tons but a few small ones I had the contractor repair and then just wrote the cheque for the extra time and materials. Most builders recognize that mistakes happen and if you catch them in time and can find a solution then there's no foul. But for those times that things go sideways it best to fess up deal with it and move on, god knows that if the contractor screwed up you nail him to a wall in a second.
The classic story my boss tells is from back in the mylar days and goes something like: an intern coworker of his was working on the drawings for a residence for a high-profile architectural firm. During the site visit right after the foundation was poured the principle looks at the walls and knows there is an obvious problem. In looking at the field set everything works and looks proper but a transposition error was made in the foundation dimensions making 24’-0” into 42’-0”… The foundation had to be saw cut back to the intended dimension and a new end wall poured.
A classic in our office (that we didn’t make) was about 10 years ago we showed up at a job site after the foundation pour at a very secluded site to find the approach was very different than we thought it would be. At first we thought we had screwed up the road/driveway to the house that was cut through the woods but after some though we discovered that the GC had positioned the foundation 90 degrees to the intended orientation. It was ripped out and re-poured.
My biggest mistake that I recall right now was right after I started as an intern. I was made a project manager very quickly and on my first major job it didn’t register to me that the valley and ridge beams the engineer specified as (2) 1 ¾” x 16 LVL’s were not going to be within the 2x12 roof rafter plane. There was no detail drawn and the GC had dropped them 1” down from the bottom or the roof sheathing resulting in between a 2 and 3” intrusion into the cathedral ceiling... There was only one location that the beams could not be shaved back to allow the GWB to pass by and we as an office struggled for a few days on a vaulted ceiling design that in the end was way better than the original design.
The elevator shaft for our building was perfect except for the W24x62 that was running right through the middle of it. If the hydro had somehow been installed it would have gone up about 16" and hit the beam. Pretty funny to me! Not to funny to the Arch and Engineer who designed the project at the time.
Wasn't there a thread on here somewhere that showed a floor with an actual arrow from a section cut installed on it? That was classic. I know there was debate if it was a photoshop special.
Now I do remember doing a house for a buddy, Tough son of bitch guy who gave me a survey of the property for me to start, which was great as the site had a ton of snow on it and a bit of a snow dumpa at the end of a road. Looked at the site and survey and all looked good. designed the house which was a bit of a tight fit but made it all come together. So I ge tthe permit and then construction has commenced and I run into him at a cafe over a coffe and he says " man we sure have a lot of concrete in the foundation.
So I go have alook and look at the survey and ask him when the survey was taken and it was a year ago which is reasonable and then he says and then we modified the end of road grades as part of our purchase agreement. Turns out the road was built up about 10 ft higher than the survey indicated creating a foundation hole about 5 stories down rather than the three expected. I initially got blamed but then made him aware that it was fine if he built to the original survey but in fact he had modified the street grade resulting in a huge variation of finish grades. I thought he was going to punch me out for being up front about it ( he had some anger management issues ) but turned out okay after he created an extra floor for his gym to work out the anger issues.
A few other times surveyors have made some elevations screw ups which caused us some grief but fortunately nothing fatal.
I was working on an addition to an old library - a neo-classical building on a plinth. The survey indicated a finish floor height that we realized, once the addition was under construction, was measured to to front door sill and did not account for the two risers in the vestibule behind that door. We ended up with a 14" taller foundation and two more risers on the new stairs. We had just enough space between the first riser and a doorway to avoid any violations, but the expanded stair ate up the space that made the new entrance feel generous.
Mistakes
Please share your worst mistakes on the job with everyone.
I once mailed out a rendering to a big client of ours. I had spent hours working on the rendering which was of a high rise mixed use residential/retail/hospitality project and I misspelled the name of the restaurant on the image. They called me out on it right away and it was kind of embarrassing at first but it was pretty funny all in all...
"...men of genius make no mistakes; their errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery." - James Joyce
i once screwed-up the plumbing coordination resulting in a gas line being in-plane with a beam we could not penetrate. ended up using flexible stainless-steel to route the line around the obstruction. $$
i once screwed up the civil coordination of a small parking structure such that we didn't have enough headroom at grade in some spaces. i spent a very late night recalculating the grades to make it work - barely...
a project with a terribly non-responsive structural engineer had worn me down after i had constantly checked and re-checked their drawings for screw-ups and lazy interpretations of the arch drawings. the building had four equal bays with a very large amount of glazing facing west - i was so busy hounding them to fix the obvious mistakes that i never noticed that the engineer had decided to use steel wide-flanges as floor-level beams on the two interior bays and wood beams on the two exterior bays. the facade, which is regular in all respects, now has two deeper beams expressed at either end bay...real nice. thanks jerk...
i'm sure i haven't made it yet. but its coming.
i was doing steel shop drawings. it was the first project that i had been allowed to detail almost entirely by myself. i hadn't done a lot of shops so i was being extra careful. it's getting late, and i'm leaving town for the weekend. i submit the drawings, and leave the office, but i have this nagging feeling that something is wrong. finally i realize that the edge of slab does not match up in both plan and section. they're off by about 3" which will screw up the cold form metal steel shops which will screw up a canted exterior wall we have. i agonize about it all weekend.
i get back to work monday. how am i going to tell the project architect about this? i stress for a good hour then bite the bullet and tell him.
"call the contractor and resubmit the shops. you worry too much."
most mistakes can be corrected.
jafidler, i'll work with you any day of the week and twice on sunday. taking initiative, integrity and personal ownership of that particular issue speaks volumes.
Young kids, take note and pay attention.
thanks, devil dog. it meant a lot to be given that much responsibility as an intern. there's no better way to learn than being put in the fire.
i have way more interesting ones than you guys. i'll post them after work.
i don't think i've ever made a mistake on the job. my funniest/most embarrassing moment, however, was probably when i walked into the glass door of the conference room right in front of everybody in the office. it was for a lunch-n-learn and i managed to spill my lunch all over myself. probably lucky that i didn't break my nose or something too because i hit it hard.
I am the architect your lOrd and protector, I do not make mistakes only solutions to problems not yet visualised
not the worst yet but it stressed me out at the time. i was straight out of school and a few months into my first job in an arch office doing cd's. i once forgot to draw two lines on the floor plan to indicate a tub access and the plumbers routed some pipes where the access was supposed to be. my boss comes to my office from the jobsite telling me that the plumber's will have to come back and re-route ($$$) because of my mistake.
in that case, we were able to move the access in a less ideal place slightly to one side.
lines are not just lines.
this one is non-architectural. i worked in a restaurant as a cashier/host. one of the waitresses asked me if i can bring drinks to one of her tables...guess what? i spilled the drinks all over the customers. it was my first time bringing drinks and i didn't know the techniques of tray balancing. it was embarrasing...i think i even had a huge smile walking towards the table with the tray of drinks like" hell yeah, we servin' it!"
Once I approved some shop drawings for doors in a remodel we were doing, unfortunately they were all the wrong color and did not match the existing doors. Fortunately we were able to salvage some doors from another portion of the job and fix my mistake. It still ended up being expensive in the long run.
dammson
your boss should have caught that while redlining your dwgs...
i detailed a floating resin countertop for a corporate reception desk with sstl bade supports at 36" o.c. well, the resin wasn't thick enough to begin with, and the track lighting directly above put enough heat on the resin to make it droop 1"+ between supports. the resin was installed the night before their open house, so all their clients got to see it, it was so pathetic...
after having the casework sub screw around trying to straighten it out, we ended up putting in 3 extra supports and a new, thicker resin slab, total cost $3600, of which we had to pay $1800 since it was a 'design error.'
not a big deal in the overall scheme of things, but embarrasing from a credibility perspective. we never worked for that client again.
i once clogged the toliet at a job site I was working on...it ended up overflowing into the shower
missed a zero for our fee in the contract amount
only realized it after the client signed and mailed in the deposit
lesson: don't write contracts late at night
Not all mistakes end tragically. Some mistakes get you free food.
When I first started, I had to help engineer a two story building on a hold-down that didnt exist. I got all the numbers off some ragged looking piece of paper that was stuck to some old calculations. After that, I was told to take the simpson class and got my free breakfast and lunch buffet.
Be sure to load up on the bacon! And they give you epoxy too.
not my mistakes but classics:
1. in the days of mylars, an intern was told to transfer the changes redlined on the prints onto the originals/mylars. as he made the changes, he was to mark that the had done them with a highlighter.
he highlighted the mylars.
2. jobsite meeting 2+ hours from town. raining. principal goes to get car, leaving intern at sidewalk to wait until car gets brought around. principal gets preoccupied and heads home, intern left on sidewalk. principal realizes some time later....
I was working in an office when I first started out where one of the associates was working on an elementary school. It was one of those
open floor plans schools with tons of cabinets for storing things. Anyhow the cabinets were scaled to fit the students heights. So he is racing thru the shop drawings and changes the heights on all of the cabinets so they are 6" shorter in height. Cabinets show up on the job and low an behold all the cabinets in the administrative work rooms are sized for first graders....so they all got shipped off to our
new office where we had steel frames built to raise them up off the floor to a workable height. They worked slick as ever because they were now furniture the partners were able to write them off for tax purposes as furniture.
i've heard them all. the transposing 2'-7" to 27" is a classic though. but, here's my mistake of the week:
we are renovating an old farmhouse/ranch for some out of towners. this farm/ranch contains several old buildings, including an old log chicken coop. my boss' idea was to use the chicken coop for the guy's new woodshop which would be attached to his garage.
in order to make sure this building would work for the wood shop, another employee and myself took a trip to the site last winter to get some quick, overall measurements. i didn't really think about it at the time, but it wasn't exactly an as-built session. we didn't even walk all the way around the building. but these became the drawings transposed to what was built last week.
so anyway, my first red flag is that, last spring when i was drawing this thing, i realized from our photos that we had two of the existing windows were flip-flopped. so i went out to verify these two windows and updated them on the plan. but stupid me didn't think to check anything else. of course it is important to note that, when using an existing building, it is important to field verify all measurement, and to my credit i definitely put this on the plan.
none-the-less, last thursday i made a visit to the site to find....the building does not fit on the foundation, which was poured over a month ago. the rest of the garage building is almost completely framed in. somewhere either myself or the other employee read the tape wrong, or something i don't know. but the foundation is 10" longer than the log building. it is an easy fix, but there will for ever be a big ass shelf on one end, and i will have to speak to the client on monday who will surely be pissed. i can't pass the buck to the builder on this one, but like i said, we did have 'field verify' on our dim string and he definitely didn't check anything.
A small tangent, How do various offices deal with their mistakes?
I know my office has stricken a few checks to some pissed off clients in the past. Not just crediting hours for working out problems, but actully paying for change orders.
It seems like a scary door for an architect to open.
Is that just a normal part of practice?
that's a good one le bossman. i had a similar experience on a resid remodel.
it was my first project at the office and they handed me the unfinished design and nearly finished cd's to complete. it was a complicated stepped conc patio with planters and benches posts imbedded into walls and stone inlays and all kinds of funky things that we intricately layed out. the whole thing was to be poured in between the existing house and some existing steps, and the dimensions on the asbuilts were off by 3'...and the patio was only 12' wide. the contractor calls me with the concrete guy there about to pour. they poured that day and we all made it work.
in the end the redesign was better than the original. it took a while to get all the fallen dominoes back into some configuration...like the ongoing design build project that you thought was completely figured out before construction. it was an easy going project and the clients were a dream so there was no screaming involved and everyone was happy at the end. yay
sometimes you eat your mistakes, other times you charge for them. it depends on how far along you are in the process, whose fault it was, and what it affects. also, all businesses understand that, like it or not, you don't make money on every job. mistakes are completely unavoidable. sooner or later, they will happen.
I didn't detail any wrap on some metal framed decorative piers over an existing concrete landscape wall. Finished the piers with stucco, they looked great. I went back about 2 years later and they are dripping with rust... To top it off, the existing structure was really old, and had nasty maintenance issues - there had been rust everywhere leaking out of the concrete walls and the maintenace plan had been to paint EVERYTHING rust colored to hide it. The client was VERY sensitive to the issue of rust (and the color of rust actually) and our job was to do the facelift, hiding this RUSTY mess...
Otherwise, what I lack in doosies, I make up for in sheer quantity. of mistakes.
do you think these mistakes can be somewhat deterred by the implementation of new programs like revit?
i haven't used the program, but the concept of a 3-d design process through one program seems to streamline some of the work and [hopefully] reduces mistakes.
lol
I had an interesting discussion with an engineer once about the promise and peril of programs like Revit. A he specifically warned of a lack of redundancy. Basically that the engineer (or architect) would take what the computer said at face value, whereas in days of yore it used to take teams of engineers years to engineer the most complicated structures, it now takes on man with a computer and 3 weeks. Without that team of engineers to check his work, there's no redundancy and the chance of a mistake could actually increase as a computer is only as smart as its operator. This was a relatively young guy working at Arup by the way.
you don't actually have to design connections in revit.
they just look finished.
until you design them, that is.
so guess what you can't tell you haven't done yet?
I suppose one can always ask Jean Nouvel about mistakes:
Speaking personally though, my worst mistake was working on the wrong scale for weeks, before somebody noticed. Everything but the detailing was about 12% too small.
As of today I own two beautiful light fixtures with hand block printed silk shades by Galbraith and Paul. I thought I was requesting an invoice, but I was actually requesting the order be placed - oops! Problem is they won't be needed for another 8 months, and it's not clear whether their cost will be included in the owner's or the tenant's (my client) budget, so neither party is willing to pay for them until that negotiation is finalized. Since G&P is a small company who I respect enormously, I went ahead and bought the fixtures and will store them until they are needed.
Most likely I won't be reimbursed for the credit card interest that builds up on them during the next eight months, and if the project tanks, well, I can probably ebay them?
don blaim jean nouvel! it was Paul Andreu who did that particular airport.
Not my own mistake, but a friend's: Having a legally bought version of CAD-software lying in a drawer while still working with an illegal one that was already installed - out of pure laziness. The lawyers didn't care about the legal one. Cost him a fortune and nearly ruined his freshly founded office.
jump, sorry... my bad. always get my French architects confused. In any event, it did collapse :P
hey, liberty, you should try to sell them on archinect first. i don't think archinect would mind a 'buy my lamps' thread would they?
i don't think revit will help catch mistakes, partially for the reason apurimac mentions
"i don't think revit will help catch mistakes, partially for the reason apurimac mentions"
in the words of malcolm mccullough, "garbage in, garbage out."
revit allows one to draw really convincing looking mistakes.
It happened when I created a schedule for some windows and not double checking the roughs. Only later to have the framing sub have a major fit. All I could say was "contractor is responsible to field verify all dimensions"
Once I had steel beam sized to carry a large portion of a new second story addition. It was real heavy and about 20 feet long. It had to be threaded in, over and above an existing ceiling and rest on a wall twenty feet away from the end they could access . There was very little room to work. I had ordered the beam and had it brought to the site. The contractor was using a much undersized tractor to place the behemoth. A real scary site. After about 4 hours of wrangling this thing into place and the contractor almost killing himself they find out the beam is a foot too short... OOPs
Don't know how many times a sub would show up on the job site with a set of bid plans from a couple of months earlier and the job looked nothing like the old preliminary bid plans.
I learned alot from those "close calls"
Lots and lots of field measurements
double check your double checks
notes on drawings to make the general contractor knows he's responsible for updating all the subs with the most up-to-date plans
Oh man that has happened so so often. Actually I can't think of a single job where that didn't happen with at least 1 sub. Hmm.
I like this thread...
try this one on for size. The scourge of my thus far short career, three little letters... N.I.C. This is my first "big" mistake.
We don't touch parking shade structures in our office. We locate, that is it. And, it is specifically in our contracts as such. So I labelled my keynotes, "Parking shade structure, N.I.C."... Well, I now know that "C" does mean contract, but not our (the architect's) contract. Long story short, contractor did not include parking structures into the contract. Came up during a CA meeting, and I spent the next 2 hours being screamed at in front of about 10 people by the owner. When the dust settled and the COR was submitted the total damage was around $96,000... that one stung a little. But, I still have my job.
mrudolph ... well, the owner would have had to pay for it anyway!
no doubt, however the pro forma took a good hit.
The office hasn't had had tons but a few small ones I had the contractor repair and then just wrote the cheque for the extra time and materials. Most builders recognize that mistakes happen and if you catch them in time and can find a solution then there's no foul. But for those times that things go sideways it best to fess up deal with it and move on, god knows that if the contractor screwed up you nail him to a wall in a second.
Design build - shares the blame and responsibility and leads to a safer environment for everyone to do their jobs. Modified AIA Doc. 141 I believe.
The classic story my boss tells is from back in the mylar days and goes something like: an intern coworker of his was working on the drawings for a residence for a high-profile architectural firm. During the site visit right after the foundation was poured the principle looks at the walls and knows there is an obvious problem. In looking at the field set everything works and looks proper but a transposition error was made in the foundation dimensions making 24’-0” into 42’-0”… The foundation had to be saw cut back to the intended dimension and a new end wall poured.
A classic in our office (that we didn’t make) was about 10 years ago we showed up at a job site after the foundation pour at a very secluded site to find the approach was very different than we thought it would be. At first we thought we had screwed up the road/driveway to the house that was cut through the woods but after some though we discovered that the GC had positioned the foundation 90 degrees to the intended orientation. It was ripped out and re-poured.
My biggest mistake that I recall right now was right after I started as an intern. I was made a project manager very quickly and on my first major job it didn’t register to me that the valley and ridge beams the engineer specified as (2) 1 ¾” x 16 LVL’s were not going to be within the 2x12 roof rafter plane. There was no detail drawn and the GC had dropped them 1” down from the bottom or the roof sheathing resulting in between a 2 and 3” intrusion into the cathedral ceiling... There was only one location that the beams could not be shaved back to allow the GWB to pass by and we as an office struggled for a few days on a vaulted ceiling design that in the end was way better than the original design.
The elevator shaft for our building was perfect except for the W24x62 that was running right through the middle of it. If the hydro had somehow been installed it would have gone up about 16" and hit the beam. Pretty funny to me! Not to funny to the Arch and Engineer who designed the project at the time.
Wasn't there a thread on here somewhere that showed a floor with an actual arrow from a section cut installed on it? That was classic. I know there was debate if it was a photoshop special.
Now I do remember doing a house for a buddy, Tough son of bitch guy who gave me a survey of the property for me to start, which was great as the site had a ton of snow on it and a bit of a snow dumpa at the end of a road. Looked at the site and survey and all looked good. designed the house which was a bit of a tight fit but made it all come together. So I ge tthe permit and then construction has commenced and I run into him at a cafe over a coffe and he says " man we sure have a lot of concrete in the foundation.
So I go have alook and look at the survey and ask him when the survey was taken and it was a year ago which is reasonable and then he says and then we modified the end of road grades as part of our purchase agreement. Turns out the road was built up about 10 ft higher than the survey indicated creating a foundation hole about 5 stories down rather than the three expected. I initially got blamed but then made him aware that it was fine if he built to the original survey but in fact he had modified the street grade resulting in a huge variation of finish grades. I thought he was going to punch me out for being up front about it ( he had some anger management issues ) but turned out okay after he created an extra floor for his gym to work out the anger issues.
A few other times surveyors have made some elevations screw ups which caused us some grief but fortunately nothing fatal.
la la la
I was working on an addition to an old library - a neo-classical building on a plinth. The survey indicated a finish floor height that we realized, once the addition was under construction, was measured to to front door sill and did not account for the two risers in the vestibule behind that door. We ended up with a 14" taller foundation and two more risers on the new stairs. We had just enough space between the first riser and a doorway to avoid any violations, but the expanded stair ate up the space that made the new entrance feel generous.
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