Section 2 of 3  |  designshare home

Is this the type of thing that can be changed with more consulting with architects or maintenance personnel—a way of thinking you think needs to be changed?
       What I’d like to be able to do is develop a way of changing how we fund our schools. We tend to fund our schools on ‘first cost’ basis, which also, by the way, is how business tends to, which is fine and that’s good. But if we can use, for example, terrazzo flooring—that’s a good one to pick on. We know terrazzo flooring is going to last much longer than VCT, and it also requires less maintenance. If we can take those maintenance dollars for five years out and bring them into the building and buy the terrazzo, how much better off would we be over a 10-year period?
      In the same breath, look at something that actually does give you money back, and that would be the energy systems. It is very easy and cheap to put in an electric heat pump in a classroom. And if you have 30 classrooms, we can put in 30 electric heat pumps. Well, the cost to operate all those heat pumps is going to be a lot more than an old-fashioned boiler and chiller, two-pipe system. But I see some school jurisdictions who end up having to make that tradeoff at first cost, then incur a great many long-term costs in exchange for that. That’s not a maintenance issue, that’s just an operations issue.

What other types of operating costs do you see being negatively impacted by lower installation costs? What is new on the market that perhaps school districts haven’t caught up with yet?
       Roofing systems are certainly something that have come into play. We all need to look at the way we spend our money and the way we value engineer our buildings.
       The quality of a building that we put together is, over its lifetime, in direct relationship to the skill and care of its maintenance staff. I remember going to a building my father designed that was probably 30 years old, and that building looked like the day it was born. The maintenance staff there was proud of that building and took some pride in the facility. At the same time, I went to another building quite recently that had been occupied for about two weeks, and that building was an unmitigated maintenance disaster because the staff had not done anything to keep the building clean. The principal had done nothing to instill pride in the staff or the students.

Was the funding just not there or was it that the program was shoddy?
      No, it’s the caring. The materials in these two buildings were exactly the same. But the level of care from the maintenance staff in those two buildings was the difference between night and day. And I don’t know whether they were short-staffed in one school compared to another. When I walked in, it just looked like nobody cared about the building. The floors had sand all over them, the trash cans were all full, it was just a mess.

You referred to roofing. What type of roofing systems are you designing for schools?
       We are using a lot of metal roofs on smaller span buildings. We’re using modified bitumen on larger buildings where we can’t get a metal roof—larger buildings being things like high school gymnasiums that span so far that installing a metal roof or getting a sloping roof sometimes gets impractical.
       What we’re trying to do is build in long-term materials. What we’ve found is that metal roofing is a good product that is fairly easy to put down. It requires someone to be careful, but it doesn’t require a rocket scientist to make it right. Generally, we try to specify a roof that has a good manufacturer behind it, and has a good level of experience.
       In North Carolina, we brought metal roofing into schools in a big way about 15 years ago. That was the result of doing research on roofing problems involving shingle roofs on three identical high schools. They were designed by another architect in the ’70s. I know that he was under duress in a very ambitious building program with a very small budget and a mandate from the board of education of “no flat roofs.” He used shingle roofs on these three high school prototypes. When the owner called up, the buildings were 10 years old and they had been on their third shingle roof—they had leaked from the day they were born.
       At a board of education meeting, I was actually presenting another project, and someone walked in and said, “The high school roofs are leaking again,” and somebody else said, “We need to do something to fix this problem. We’ve already had two other architects and they couldn’t figure it out. Mr. Boney, what would you recommend?” And my word to them was, “I’d recommend that you let me look at it, study it, but I would almost guarantee you that I’m not going to recommend shingle roofs again.” And we ended up using metal roofs as a result of that. Those schools were dry for the first time in their whole life.

What do you use to keep the sound down in classrooms when using a metal roof, say, in a heavy rainstorm?
       We’re really using a metal roof as a rain barrier, and we’re building structure below the thing. So in our metal roofs, we end up with two separate metal membranes: one is the structural metal deck; on top of that we’re putting insulation, then on top of that insulation assembly we’re putting a metal roof. That does away with the sound problem.

www.designshare.com, August, 1999

next >