Electronic mail may help in overseas working relationships, but it isn’t everything: design architects and their collaborating architects often place their respective staffs in each other’s offices during the phases of schematic design, design development, construction documentation, and construction supervision. Gruzen Samton, which associated with Bernard Tschumi, AIA (then dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning), for Columbia’s Lerner Hall [record, November 1999, page 94], sent architects to Tschumi’s office at the beginning of the schematic-design phase. “We were all looking at various alternatives, with lots of sketches,” says Samton. “Bernard had a lot of former students from Columbia who could work on one project at a time, 24/7.” During the middle of design development, Tschumi sent architects over to Gruzen Samton. “We use a form that indicates who is going to spend how many hours, with the rates and the profits. It was eye-opening to encounter design architects with the luxury of having more time per project, and staffed with young architects willing to work weekends and nights without extra pay.”
The sharing procedure gets more complicated if the star architect only has overseas offices. Bruce Fowle, FAIA, whose firm FXFowle (formerly Fox & Fowle) is the executive architect for Renzo Piano Building Workshop for the New York Times tower, now in construction in New York City, reports that the two firms set up a schedule where they would meet one month in Piano’s Paris office and the next month in FXFowle’s New York office. Piano placed two or three people in Fowle’s office in the construction document phase and at least one person in construction administration phase, mainly to check shop drawings.
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