Building a City Takes a Village, Deserves Thanks

BUILDING DIALOGUE: In the Details

We celebrated my son’s birthday recently and, as is tradition in our family on every holiday, he received a Lego set. As we were pouring over the instructions and laying out the pieces, we talked about how Lego blocks are created. We discussed the plastic material used, that there was a different mold for each brick and specialty piece.

Andre LH Baros, AIA
Architect, Shears Adkins Rockmore

He told me about the designers of the individual pieces and interviews with those who work to design entire sets. Then we thought about the people working in the factory and those who designed and produced the boxes. We even contemplated the work of the marketing teams, the salespeople and the janitors. (It was a pretty intense conversation!)

This reminded me of the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, whose eponymous firm, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), recently completed the Lego House. He implied in “A Lego Brickumentary” (I know, I know – I probably would have watched it even if I didn’t have kids) that all architecture today is like building with Lego blocks. As an architect, this gave me pause; are we really so modular? My son and I estimated that possibly a hundred, or hundreds, of people came together to make his Lego set. How many, then, come together on a daily basis to build new structures in Denver?

The complex thing we call a building is the result of thousands of working men and women up and down the supply chain. As contributors to the building process, we know this, but to stop and actually think about it is pretty daunting. Take the lowly CMU, or concrete masonry unit, the humble Lego brick of the real world; it has an entire team behind it: engineers, salespeople, manufacturers, delivery people, masons, mason trainers, flashing people, mortar people, backup people, detail experts and installation experts.

There’s a joke in architecture that no matter how big or how small the project, it takes six months to permit and 24 months to build. True or not, you could also say that no matter how big or how small the project, it takes hundreds of people to make it happen. One of my students recently asked me about the size of the team for a project on which I am working. Certainly, he was probably considering the architectural team and engineers, but when I started to list everyone involved, the list of my teammates went on and on. As an architect, I’m somewhere halfway down a long list of people who include many subject matter experts, makers, managers and mavens who make our city happen.

There is a mythology around key people, such as the developer, the star architect and the master builder, which suggests that one person can be responsible for creating a building. In truth, we all know that without teamwork and a supply chain, nothing is built. Sure, you could build a modern (nontiny) home all by yourself, over the course of, like, 500 years. From the hammer and nails, to the lumber, to the trucker who delivered it, we rely on a broad network to get us what we need at our stage of the process. Bootstraps and the self-made building are a myth.

So, as we round up this year, it might be time to tip our hats of gratitude to all of the people who make it happen, from the engineers to the financiers, from the sales reps to the construction managers, from the plumbers to the people who clean the site when the building is finally complete. Every screw, window and built-in cabinet had someone’s hands on it. Notice the details as much as the façade; don’t just look through the window but look at it, and join me in saying, “Thank you.” And, while you’re at it, the next time you pick up a Lego brick, you might just pull out your Danish dictionary and say, “Tak.”

Published in the December 2017 issue of Building Dialogue.