A Perspective on Documentation

I have travelled the world to visit the great monuments of architecture like Notre Dame, the Pantheon and the Hagia Sophia without realizing we have a comparable building in my hometown:  one of the most exciting recent projects in Los Angeles is the restoration of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple by Brenda Levin of Levin & Associates Architects.  Originally dedicated in 1929 and built by the leading Jewish filmakers of the day  (Sid Grauman, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer and the Warner Brothers) it is nothing short of spectacular!  Both inspirational and theatrical, with one of the largest and tallest domes in the U.S., it had fallen into an advanced state of disrepair with 70 years of water infiltration.  Ms. Levin found the original construction documents of less than 30 pages — her restoration documents numbered in the hundreds of pages.  The restoration work is breathtaking and is well worth a visit.

One of the biggest changes that I have witnessed over the past 25 years is the amount of information and documentation required to complete a project today.  It can’t be that projects are more complex – the Temple is an example of that.   There are probably several factors that have led us to this situation.

Regulations and litigation have exploded over the past quarter century.  Here in California, the 1978 Proposition 13 initiative limiting property tax has created a constant concern over State funding of services.  Coupled with CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act) procedures, this has resulted in myriads of fees, oversight, and complexities for development.  We used to have one Building Code book that has expanded to nine volumes today.  Disabled access now requires meticulous attention given that there is no room for error and little room for construction tolerances.

Planning agencies have become more vocal and demanding.  While this phenomenon has, in many ways, improved the quality of development in our cities, there are also numerous examples of overreach, where every project must be prepared to go through a fight. To be fair, I have had numerous examples of exemplary cooperation with agencies who assemble their whole staff to review and work together to create winning solutions.  However, there are other jurisdictions or individuals within who seem to stand  firmly in the way of progress, (perhaps through inexperience or personal bias, even suggesting to ignore building code or fire requirements) to push their agendas without regard to project feasibility.

Diminishing resources, especially water and electricity, have created entirely new areas of detail.  Storm water management has become one of the primary activities of many Civil Engineering firms and landscape architects devote much attention to irrigation concepts.  Planning for solar is now standard and affects the design of both home and community.  Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED) and other green building programs have made responsible design the norm, but at the cost of extensive documentation and oversight.

The use of computer technology has dramatically affected the way we all do our work.  The ability to share information in real time has accelerated the pace of everything.  One result is the amount of documentation provided has exploded because we can.  With new BIM technologies such as Revit, we can literally construct a building on paper (really on-screen), with every bit of the project documented.  I can remember when we could do a reverse-read foundation plan and the builder could interpret and build a reverse-read home from that.  Not any more.

That doesn’t mean that builders actually use all of this information, given the explosion of ‘Requests for Information’ (RFIs) that hardly existed 25 years ago.  The demand for more information stems from a variety of things including the fact that drawings are so complex the issue may be difficult to find.  There may also be lack of expertise with a less-skilled labor pool.  In the days of the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, master builders knew how to build a project from a sketch and there were apprentice programs to pass along their knowledge.  And, of course, today’s litigious environment requires more documentation of everything.

As we close out 2015, our industry can look back and realize that while all of these changes have not been easy, we can be proud of the results.  Our buildings today are the most energy- and resource-efficient ever.  Our planned communities offer a quality of life that has become the envy of the world.  New buildings are better able to withstand the effects of quake, flood, and fire than ever before.  Technology can help achieve remarkable buildings that model energy usage, solar exposure, and so much more.  I wonder what the next 25 years will bring?

This article has also been published in the latest issue of Builder and Developer magazine.