John, > Many times I used to debate quality issues with my old partner. He read > ZAMM, most of the way through, and we'd talk about the significance of > installing quality patterns into what you do. At the time, the idea was to > be successful as a business. But as it turned out, caring about the quality > of your work isn't that conducive to building up a good construction > business. Business runs on profit and profit comes from skimping, hiring > illegal aliens to work cheap while buying flashy-looking equipment that > looks impressive to intimidate your clients into signing; taking shortcuts > and cheating. > > I have a lot of contempt for the majority of practitioners of my chosen > profession.
Is that contempt rightly placed? I am not talking about the obvious crooks, criminals, who have no intention of doing anything other than defrauding their clients. I am talking about builders of all different types and sizes that try, to the best of their ability, to do "good" work at a prices that allows them to continue to do that over time. As a son of a startup pickup contractor my exposure to construction started before I was a teenager. I became a union journeyman rough carpenter upon turning 18. I worked primarily on concrete formwork on dams and other industrial type projects off and on until I graduated from college in architecture in 1972. I interned with small architectural firms and became a registered architect in 1974. The bulk of all my work since then has been done by the design-build method. Under this method the owner, general contractor, and architect are all on board at the start of the design process and work together over the course of the whole project. For the past nearly 40 years I worked on everything from small remodels and houses to manufacturing plants of over 400,000 square feet. Mostly larger commercial and industrial work though. During that time I cannot even guess how many different construction firms and people I have worked with. But I can say that the owners always got exactly, or more than, what they asked for at the price they agreed to. Now did some of the people involved over promise and underperform? Of course. But over the long haul the majority of the contractors and all their subs did the best job they could with the cards they were dealt. Was it really "good," "quality" work? If one listens to and believes social and architectural critics none of it was. It was all sprawl and greedy corporations expanding their stranglehold over unwitting consumers and downtrodden labor. Not an acclaimed piece of "Art" in the whole bunch. Not that any of the clients were asking for "art" in the first place. Who's fault is that? Even though all of this work provided "better" places to work, new jobs, and less expensive products than the before these projects were there, you imply in part it's the builders fault. I could have just as easily suggested it's the fault architects like me. Both counts are wrong in IMHO. Here is where RMP helps. Ideas are potentially the highest quality patterns but they have no legs. The arms, legs, hands, head, and heart that pounds the nails is way down on the biological/physical level. As is all the built world. So unless good ideas somehow capture the attention and are adopted by the social level in a big way nothing "good" happens down there. So buildings are not a leading indicator of what is going on in a society but a lagging one. Ideas must change first, then societies adopt them, then the environment is changed to reflect those ideas. Are the problems perceived in the built world due to a lack of "good" ideas? I don't believe so. Take the current "energy crisis" for example. When I was in college nearly 50 years ago we were discussing ecology, passive solar design and all the other planning issues to reduce energy consumed by building. Hell, my first failed attempt at my own practice was called, "Thomas & Sun." Why did it fail? By trying to sell ideas that the public wasn't buying. My guess is that your problems were similar. So from my perspective the built quality of the environment is exactly the quality the society wants. No more, no less. Until their values change what you see is what you got. And no amount of idealistic architects or builders, by themselves, are going to change that in any significant way. Real crises do. I'm kinda cheering on global warming, hurricanes, floods, and pestilence! Hold the fire and brimstone though :-) Dave Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
