Choose Your Battles: ArchiTalks
December 11, 2017When we ran out of our prepared questions, we asked if anyone there had any pet peeves or things they like to see. It is good to ask this but it is a bit of a loaded question and can also be the opener to the proverbial Can ‘O’ Worms. It turns out the Fire Marshal doesn’t really like vinyl siding or engineered lumber (TGI’s). Their reason for the aversion: vinyl siding “is like solid gasoline” and “TGI’s fail too soon”. Now, both of these items are tested and rated like any other construction material. Both sides of the table knew that the design called for both, and both sides also knew that it was perfectly acceptable, according to all prevailing building codes. The fact that they don’t like those materials really didn’t matter much. But for a response, we listened and nodded our heads and that was it. We all knew those two products would be in the project in the end and arguing about it now would only cause our local hosts to feel less amiable towards the out of town architects. So we basically zipped it while we indicated we understood their point of view.
Melted vinyl siding as a result of a fire. Photo Credit: Scott Eklund/Seattle Post-Intelligencer A little like insanely hot silly string when engulfed, I bet. |
What do you say to that? In the end we said we would talk to our landscape designer about running a boarder of pea gravel around the building in lieu of pushing mulch beds right to the exterior walls. But in reality, we know we wouldn’t be able to pay for all that gravel. There was nothing else we could have said to assuage their fears. Our meeting was over, it was lunch time, and suddenly we were in the mood for pancakes.
Limit Their Stress By Limiting Their Choices
Choices — Your turn
A million choices
How Do You Deal with Choices During the Design Process?
choices
Slow… merge… stop
–>Michele Grace Hottel – Michele Grace Hottel, Architect (@mghottel)
“Choices…”
–>Lora Teagarden – L² Design, LLC (@L2DesignLLC)
Choices