Thursday, June 12, 2008

I Suppose Late is Better than Never

Johnny, Marianna and I went for a big pow-wow with the folks from Mega, Randy Wood's office, the developers and NCS this morning up at the site, and jesus - this meeting should have happened months ago. I suppose we they all thought that Mega would be long gone by this point and none of this would even be an issue - but they are so far behind schedule that we'll all be working on the job site at the same time now, and so we really should have met face-to-face a long time ago. Mega was awesome though - the owner George was there, as well as Alex the construction manager and Tony the site supervisor. They were super helpful and they were really enthusiastic about the project and they seemed really willing to help. They had some (totally understandable) concerns about insurance, pulling new permits on their open one (and the repercussions for the CO of doing that) and us making modifications to a project that they are still technically responsible for, since they haven't turned it over to NCS yet.

We brought the big model up and all of our drawings and Johnny and I gave a little overview of the whole thing for the folks who hadn't seen any of it before. I think Mega was initially pretty concerned over the idea of a bunch of students tearing into their brand new building, but once we proved that we had been taking it all very seriously and we, in fact, new exactly what we were talking about and had already thought a lot about possible problems - they ended up being much more amenable to us. Once they were happy that we knew what we were up to building-wise, a lot of it shifted to discussion of the insainly complex ownership/responsibility trail for this project. Technically (I think) this building is still owned by HPD (the city of NY?) and WHEDCO is the developer, and Mega is responsible for it all until the CO is issued and then NCS (maybe) will be the 'owner.' Not that I understood any of it - either way - the insurance and liability stuff has to go through like ten different offices before we get the all clear to build.

But everyone seemed pretty happy to actually sit in a room and talk about it all. So in the end, there was some good, and some bad.

Glass half-empty:
  • No water, ever.
  • No Elevator, ever. suck!
  • No bathrooms (Mega's portajohns)
  • No crane on site - would have to be in the road
  • Work hours are 7am-6pm only - no late nights, no weekend permits ($500/day!!!)
  • The building doesn't have full power yet

Glass half-full shit:
  • Mega might let us use their Lull instead of having to get a crane!
  • We should have access whenever we want / not have to have anyone from Mega there watching over us
  • Its NOT a Union site - saves us a ton of cash!
  • Mega will let us drop our steel on site and do our fabrication there!
  • And just in general - They seemed really cool to work with and totally fine with what we are up to. So thats a huge load off.

I'm sorry . . . you took what on the subway?


Well, at least its always an adventure. You'd never know how many people you walk by in a day love architecture until yer carrying a huge-ass model with ya.

Still plenty to figure out - but things are moving nicely now. We are meeting with Harriet tonight to go over our revised steel before she runs it through her analysis program. Hopefully she is cool with it now and we'll be able to move forward pretty quickly.

I'm also rocking out on the schedule these days. (I know: betchya didn't think you could rock out on such a thing - but I can!) I'm lovin on the Microsoft Project right now - haven't quite figured out the best way to set it all up yet, but I think my new organization will work pretty damn well.



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