–Learning never exhausts the mind. – Leonardo da Vinci Blog story no. 28 for www.architects-tales.com, Copyright 2019 by Dale R. Ellickson It was a typical hot and muggy day in Atlanta when the bulldozer was driven off the flat...
–Learning never exhausts the mind.
– Leonardo da VinciBlog story no. 28 for www.architects-tales.com, Copyright 2019 by Dale R. Ellickson
It was a typical hot and muggy day in Atlanta when the bulldozer was driven off the flat bed trailer and sent to clear the site for a new shopping center. As the dozer began cutting through the ground vegetation, it started sinking lower and lower until it was completely gone from sight – driver and all.
Sketch of dozer sinking into kudzu
The construction superintendent and his surveyor’s crew scrambled towards the sound of the still rumbling dozer engine and found that they were running down a steep embankment. When they reached the driver, he was completely covered with vines and their leaves. They realized that the dozer had plowed into a field of kudzu.
Kudzu is a non-native plant first introduced to the United States at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia at the Japanese Pavilion. Later, in the 1930’s, the invasive vine was given to Southern farmers to stop soil erosion. It was found to grow fast, about a foot per day, and to cover anything in its path – telephone poles, discarded cars, and even whole trees.
The kudzu at the shopping center site had grown to a common height disguising a deep ravine and making the terrain appear to be flat.
As soon as he could, the superintendent telephoned his office with the bad news. The president of the construction firm, in turn, called the architect complaining about the site and demanding a change order to pay for the firm’s unanticipated expense for additional fill dirt. The architect in response asked the contractor if anyone in their firm had visited the site or examined the site drawings (that showed the site’s steep contours) before they submitted a bid.
“No, we just had a drive by,” said the contractor.
What followed was an intense argument among the contractor, owner and architect over the substantial expense to create a level site. In the end, the site drawings, which were part of the contract documents, convinced the contractor that he had made a mistake and would have to swallow the cost for the fill dirt.
Bernard “Rocky” Rothschild on the left speaking to William Stanley Parker on the right
Sometime later, this same story was told to the AIA’s national Documents Committee by Atlanta architect, Bernard “Rocky” Rothschild, FAIA. He suggested that a new clause should be added to AIA Document A201, General Conditions of the Contract for Construction.Today, that clause reads:
Execution of the Contract by the Contractor is a representation that the Contractor has visited the site, become generally familiar with local conditions under which the Work is to be performed and correlated personal observations with requirements of the Contract Documents.Many of the provisions in A201 are supported by real life stories, but few are as entertaining as Rocky’s.
Some people have disparagingly said that architects only produce “pretty drawings.” If that were the case, very few buildings would be built to look like those pretty drawings. Architects realized long ago that they had to have a significant part in the whole process from design to completion of the construction. Thus, they needed to be involved in the drafting of the owner’s contract with the general contractor. Today, the typical construction contract assembled and administered by an architect consists of many pages of documents. They include at least the following six groups of documents:
Owner-Contractor Agreement form that adopts by reference all the other documents into it.General Conditions of the Contract for Construction with project-specific modifications added by Supplementary or Special Conditions.Addendum to facilitate corrections to the documents before the agreement is signed.Specifications, which are the written technical requirements for products and systems. They are also one part of the two parts of the Construction Documents.Drawings, which are often referred to as “working drawings” or even “blueprints.” They are the other part of the Construction Documents.Change Orders, Change Directives and other Modifications to the construction contractRocky suggested changes to the General Conditions because he and his associates knew that such a change would by practice be implemented nation-wide through the common usage of those General Conditions.
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