![]() ![]() The drawings and specs worked together to describe the intended whole, where neither drawings nor specs alone could do that. Despite the old saying that “a picture is worth a thousand words,” the architectural drawings commonly needed thousands of words to establish quality standards for competitive bidding and construction of an acceptable quality. Small or large firms developing designs that would be bid by several contractors or by unfamiliar contractors needed to develop complete written specs in order to augment their drawings with technical product information that was generally too wordy to appear on the drawings. ![]() In another situation, a contractor who was very familiar with an architect made no fuss about specs for tilt-up concrete walls on a project where the walls were intended to be thin, GFRC panels which had not been specified but had been discussed in meetings and over the phone. The residential designer-builder cited above did not see a need to develop formal, written specs to communicate his intent. The need for completeness and accuracy in written specs tended to be inversely related to the familiarity between the contractor and the architect. They were expected to “get it done” without much time or attention. These large firm spec writers were not principals in the firm, and they tended to be regarded as lower level – albeit necessary – staff. Where the small firm principal controlled both the design and the specs and had to mentally integrate and coordinate these graphic and written requirements, the spec writers in the large firm had to rely on information shared verbally by the designers and had to interpret what they saw on the drawings. One significant difference in the role of the spec writer in the large firm was the physical separation from design activity and design decisions. They would mark up spec sections selected from previous projects to be retyped by secretarial staff in the office, and they would check the retyped specs for accuracy before they were issued for bidding. These spec writers performed functions similar to those performed by the principal in the small firm. The spec writers had a room full of catalogs and files of information on products customarily specified for the firm’s projects. Working as an architectural production employee in a large, 250-person firm, I found that specifications were prepared in a Spec Department. When I worked for a residential design-build contractor, the specs were very informal and most often were unwritten – the stuff of conversations with clients, material suppliers, carpenters, and subcontractors. ![]() The principal architect would then check for typos before the specs “went out the door” with the drawings to be bid by a contractor or contractors. The typing itself would have been tedious work, but that was the way of word processing before we had access to computers and word processing software. ![]() The principal architect controlled what went into the specs, also incorporating sections from engineering consultants as applicable. Designers and drafters in the office were not involved in this process. In the small four-person firm where I first worked, the principal architect developed the spec for each project, marking up a spec book from a previous project and then sending it out for typing. Of course, coordination is less a problem if the architect and the spec writer are the same person, assuming the architect has the time to also write specs. It takes a concerted effort to facilitate the effective two-way communication and coordination that are needed to compensate for these organizational changes, given the architects’ continuing professional responsibility for specs as integral components of construction documents. Despite this need, it seems the general trend in the profession has been to divorce the writing of specs from the practice of architecture, taking spec writing out of the hands of principal architects and delegating it to other staff in remote corners of the firm’s office or to separate consultants, and, more recently, to remote software databanks. Spec writing and related technologies have changed some over those years, but one constant has been the need for effective communication and coordination between the architect and the spec writer. Reading recent grumblings by specifications (spec) consultants, I started thinking back over the roles of the spec writers at firms where I have worked since I began my architectural career in the 1960s. ![]()
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