CREJ

/ BUILDING DIALOGUE / DECEMBER 2017

Building a City Takes a Village, Deserves Thanks

e celebrated my son’s birthday re-

cently and, as is tradition in our fam-

ily on every holiday, he received a

Lego set. As we were pouring over the instruc-

tions 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. 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 conver-

sation!)

This reminded me of the Danish architect Bja-

rke 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 hun-

dreds, of people came together to make his Lego

set. How many, then, come together on a daily ba-

sis to build new structures in Denver?

The complex thing we call a building is the re-

sult 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 ac-

tually 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 ex-

perts 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 consid-

ering 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,

Andre LH

Baros, AIA

Architect,

Shears

Adkins

Rockmore

In the Details