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I’ve been interviewing a fair bit recently, as well as picking up the occasional independent project for front-end work that firms don’t have the staff to play with.
For me, doing front end dev work is just fine. I want to help, and paying bills is a good thing. The hours are nice, the commute to the coffee maker is 6′ away, and as long as I’ve got my tech – I can crank out the work from nearly anywhere with electricity.
Now one of the ways that I crank out the product and get a ‘holy crap’ reaction from the firms that hire me – is having access to content.
My approach to tech in design, started some 20+ years ago, I was drawing in AutoCAD with blocks instead of just linework. That also made the transition into Architectural Desktop and then to Revit a LOT easier.
It also began the collection of blocks, groups, objects & pre-formed data for application in projects. Part of my first ever drafting job at a 4-person manufacturing engineering firm (when I was 19) was about creating tools & libraries as much as it was about detailing components, running old-school blueprints on a machine that leaked ammonia, or hot swapping pens on the pen plotter when the 6′ machine assembly drawings were getting printed on 6-8 feet of paper.
Before there was Windows 3.11, I helped develop pull-down menus that referenced a library of hydraulic and pneumatic actuators for an engineering add-on.
That’s the long way of saying – I’ve been at this content thing since before ‘content’ was used to reference intangible collections of digital media and entertainment.
To that end – I know first hand how valuable it can be to have access to collected data. Generally referred to as ‘my toys’ or ‘my stuff’.
As in “Why’d you go and breaking my toys?”
One of those ‘grandpa-isms’ that echoes in the brain pan is:
“When you’re up to your ass in alligators, its a little difficult to remember the initial objective was to drain the swamp.”
With that in mind, one of the many many hats that I’ve worn while working in various firms has been ‘librarian’. Maintaining the collection of pieces and parts, developing methods for detailing and creation to keep up with shifting schedules and needs/wants. More often than not – off the clock.
For example – somewhere in the middle of any given project, there will be a last-minute need/want injected into the deliverables. It’ll be a half-dozen design options to move a wall over and redevelop the space you just detailed out. That’ll chew up a week worth of time, and kill the last 3 days worth of progress… plus the deadline isn’t moving. (I’ve redone the entire envelope of a hotel 3x by myself over masonry dimensions & continuous insulation with a week or so left to deadline. Things like this happen all the time).
Walk into any office, scan the people working there and the one with their head in their hands who looks like they haven’t slept much lately – and you’ll find the person that just happened to.
If you pre-plan the process for these landmines – its not that big of a deal. It still isn’t any fun to be thrown in the blender – but part of the answer to this situation is a well-stocked toolbox.
Well, when you’re the one maintaining your tools, there’s no down-time between projects to fix the thing that didn’t work in the last project while time is marching on – eventually you end up with a pile of busted stuff, hot-fixed to work in the last project or a line-drawn workaround because not everyone on the team has the same knowledge base.
If you’re lucky, at the close of a monster deadline – you have a few days or a week where the load is lighter and you can collect and maintain.
My downtime tends to happen on a longer timeline. 6-10 years on, a year off…
Either way – the collection can get a little bruised in battle. Parameters renamed or added, methods of construction changed, or something repurposed blows up the minute you try and change the height… gremlins appear in the library.
It’s been a good time to fix it, and if it can help anyone – a good time to get these things out to anyone who might find it useful.
(I’m well behind the curve doing things like this, but see the alligator comment. I had over 3k billable hours in 2019 – downtime wasn’t something that happened often).
If you are/were a Revit/IT guy in a firm that I’ve worked at – you’ve heard this suggestion.
“Why not use the existing projects to help populate a library of tools for everyone?”
EVERY project has standard construction details. Standard assemblies. Or a reasonable facsimile from project to project. Collect that stuff in post construction, clean it up and save it for reuse. Recycle right?
Anecdotally, I had a project in 2006 that contained steel framed windows & doors. That product hasn’t changed in 300 years. I built all the parts. Since then I’ve used those pieces in the detailing of 5-6 different projects. The specifics might change, but the connection is largely similar.
I’ve gotten myself into trouble trying to explain this in conversations lately.
As architect’s & designers – we’re trained to treat each individual project as this wonderful bespoke environment carefully crafted and suited for a specific time and place, and its completely true. When its practiced as a boutique/bespoke creative solution for a single client – its a beautiful creative enterprise. I don’t care if the solution is literally a port-a-potty. An elegant solution is an elegant solution.
Now comes the ‘but’.
The lion’s share of these wonderfully bespoke projects are governed by similar codes, solves similar base problems, and is composed of similar parts.
If its a branded/developer hotel project – most of the rules are already in place. How well you do against the fee depends on front-end design chops and your library. (One of the keys to the ‘holy crap’ reaction).
Topologically speaking, because of continuous insulation requirements – most building envelopes are rain screen details. Any veneer element you choose – the envelope core is similar.
The same thing holds true for interiors. There are more opportunities to create and explore uniqueness – but certain principles still apply. As an example: That bar is beautifully unique and branded for this restaurant, but its still got a die-wall, top/substrate, drink rail, possible foot rail and integrated lighting for the food service equipment under it.
Bear in mind – all this comes from someone who has had a solid foot in the production side of realizing built work for 2.5 decades. When you’ve detailed out the 15th hotel envelope that year, regardless of location – the differences are negligible.
I can’t say if this is a ‘eureka’ moment for anyone… All I can do is speak for me, and from my experience – well like I said, the suggestion has been made, more than a few times.
Last place, I even wrote a dissertation about collecting elements regionally and having a quarterly share across offices complete with librarian duties and a how-to on project scraping and best practices.
I was teaching everyone how to do that anyway to increase productivity 😁.
One of the first places that I started was with my library of detail parts. Division by division, I spent the last couple of weeks combing thru the stock Revit library, as well as past projects and things that I’ve invented or gathered along the way, and rebuilt and retooled all of it to work with my developed template with line weights retooled, and consistency built into all of it. That’s going to pass into my library of assemblies in the near future.
Drafting view after drafting view, sorted by division, including everything that I could think of for ‘basis of design’ detail components.
Including, but not limited to Revit line work components for:
I spent WEEKS looking thru detail catalogs of different components and combing thru past projects for things that I’ve built on the fly in the past to collect, rename, and rebuild them all. Now it serves as a solid jumping off point for future growth.
Every time that I’ve needed something and not had it – I never had the time to request someone else make it. Usually that was a 1-week turnaround when it was necessary in the moment. Once you make something – save it somewhere for “first order retrievability” as learned from Adam Savage.
For years – that has been a jump drive in my pocket. A decade worth of knowledge and parts.
The last few days, I’m expanding this to other portions of the toy collection. After wrapping up a quick project to help out a colleague on a project in California – I started retooling something that I had used for that project.
The highest concentration of tools and doo-dads in any residential project are in the kitchens and bathrooms. If you read the post that I made about the hotel as-builts that I wrote a few months ago – when I start refining a project, that’s where I start.
It’s not particularly sexy, but in large developments – kitchens + bathrooms are a key part. Designing a layout that meets accessibility code, or can be converted for accessibility is something that will help you when preliminary design is thru and you run your first code check to uncover the percentage of Type A, B, and C units you have. It helps to have something in place that doesn’t require a total redesign of the 50+ units you proposed to the client, or the 180+ hotel rooms you developed.
They also inform or establish the footprint and vertical stacking required for plumbing and ventilation.
In the process of building out the 2-3 kitchen types for this quick model/fit, I discovered that most of the casework families that I’ve built over the years have been tweaked multiple times on the fly, and weren’t really consistent in their organization. Naming, parameter order, functionality, materials and the ‘language’ that I’d used has progressed over the years.
(One thing you learn when you have a few days to build out all the branded parts for a hotel spec is how to get faster at it.)
So, I started in. Using ‘best practices’ and the design methods I had been using during the speed-building of the public spaces of a Hyatt Place, Radisson Country Inn & Suites and a Marriott Moxy – I created all the parts.
The 3-4 types of cabinets being used out there include: Flush Panel, Shaker, Raised Panel and some variety of glass fronts… So I build components to expand what I have so far into those other construction types.
As an observational human being, I also realize that there’s a significant number of homes in my family that all have face-framed cabinets. So its probably useful for residential design work to have that pencil in the drawer. So now the basic cabinet problem has 6 variations based on construction type. Part of that comes from a great uncle who was a cabinet maker. Anyone in the immediate family who owned a home while he was with us, has face-framed raised panel cabinets with similar detailing.
IF you build all of the parts to be hot-swappable, you can provide variation to a library with limited effort.
Sidebar: Somewhere in the middle of this, I invented a method of doing things that solved a problem I encountered – but also required that I retool everything that I’d made to that point. Oops. I spent the better part of a day rebuilding parts and reloading them into families. Inside of that – I also figure out a better way to hot swap parts, so all in all its still beneficial.
Flush Panel becomes Shaker? Replace the door panel type, without rebuilding the whole unit.
I realize that these are all the ingredients for a ‘super family’ of a dozen different cabinet types, but I’m also going into this with a greater realization:
Not everyone has a degree in CS. Not everyone has the time or patience to learn how to use a particular tool – and when you’re in the foxhole – you’re past the opportune moment to learn to use the tools in front of you.
In addition to being flexible – Revit families should be easy to understand without much direction needed.
Its a developed pet peeve. You’ve got a deadline in a week, you finally get the staff requested at the front end of the project, and nobody knows how to use the stuff built for the project. You either have to spend the days training and managing, or you have to spend the night redoing progress. Either way – you’re the one that’s going to have to have a talk about why you’re banking so many hours.
In this case, unless you’re specifying all the hardware & cabinets by type (ala corporate coffee shop that generates a total materials list from the Revit model) – you should be able to tweak things in place while laying it out.
With that in mind – I’m building units that are Typed by counter height. All base cabinets have a height parameter in them, based on counter height. Primarily 36″ AFF and 34″ AFF to start, Generally speaking – counter height & accessibility is a situational design requirement.
Dimensionally, things like Width (and with uppers) Top of Cabinet & Height are also situational. As a user, you also don’t want to have to find at type inside a list, inside another list of hundreds if something needs to get loaded or swapped later on. Plus if you have a bank of cabinets in a conference room, is a pain in the ass to figure out equal spacing. The ‘top panel’ drawer height in drawer units is also variable in place. Universally they’re 6″ in most projects that I’ve been on, but you never know, especially in the under-desk pencil drawer applications.
Hosting:
Just don’t do it. If you group hosted families – its going to break. If you copy a group and there’s no wall in the next unit – things disappear. Copy/Editing things that require another piece of geometry in order to live, are generally a bad idea.
Kitchen counters and in-place vanities:
Another one of those pain points are locating and aligning counter penetrations like grommets & sinks. My personal solution is a set of sinks that cut the counter they’re in. I know what I just said about hosting elements – Don’t judge me. This one is an exception to overcome building 30 varieties of counters for a single-use, and the GC is going to order a rectangular unit when the spec says oval. The plumbing engineer will accept that because that haven’t read the ID spec that calls out the unit that the brand wants…. its a whole thing.
The mission: To rebuild the casework library I already had utilizing components that could be easily swapped out to expand the library without going bespoke on what ultimately will be hundreds of pieces.
For that, I needed to unitize parts. Cabinet boxes, door fronts, drawer fronts, some representational hardware, toe spaces, pull-out units, scribes, etc. Just like actually building them without all the sawdust (as a completion-ist – its forever bothersome that I can’t figure something out and build the finished version)
Basically anything that needs to be represented in a walk-thru or pointed at and described for construction documents.
From this kit of parts – I have the tools required to build out residential and commercial cabinets in endless configurations and construction types.
I’m still not sure whether or not its entirely necessary to get into the 2 more kinds of face-framed variations on construction type (Full Fush or Partial Cover) but that’s a problem for future me and a level of detail that I can’t really fathom needing at the present time.
From that – we get the image below. So far, the families are all open-framed, flush panel cabinets (pretty universal) with some glass fronts and full-height pantry and display cabinets. Open, Single and Double units, pull-outs, variable number of shelves, lock, cash drawer for retail environments, accessible sink base cabinet… All variable width, typed height, and enough functionality to satisfy small adjustments to be made on the fly.
From this collection, I’ll also be producing a library of shaker and raised panel styles, as well as one batch for food services.
For those who don’t know – generally the health code requires that you either be able to:
If you’re looking for that ‘holy crap’ response from a client or employer – being armed with functional tools and applicable knowledge goes a long way. Content.
In Life, in Architecture or whatever your chosen profession may be – there are those events that you can’t possibly plan for. For the times that you need to produce a mass quantity of detailed work in an ever-shrinking timeframe – its going to help your blood pressure if you gather functional tools & knowledge.
In an increasingly competitive environment – its going to help the bottom line by adding value to the process. Front-end developing the tool kit is an effective way to do that. I’ve managed to produce a sizable quantity of construction with rather limited teams, because I built the tools to do a lot of the heavy lifting.
Call it the Tony Stark approach – build something you only have to fire once.
Front end design layouts usually gather that ‘holy crap’ from clients because the layout tools that I’ve used to create the spaces already contain the elements they need to effectively communicate the solution to all parties involved.
After I hit publish on this post, I’m also redoing counters, waterfall counters, and starting into food service casework families. After working on numerous kitchen and retail spaces in the past it’ll all come in handy.
If you’ve got a need for things like this or any completely custom units that there’s nobody around to build for your project – hit me up on Twitter, LinkedIn or email me here:
As always, cheers for now. I’ll be over here, making stuff if you need anything.
-JM
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