Michael Stern

By Michael Stern, JDS Development Group Photo by C Cai on Unsplash The question arrives early and it is always put the same way. Can we get the column out of the corner. On a narrow floor plate that question is the plan rather than a detail of it, because the corner is where the rooms want glass on two sides and where the structure wants something solid. This is written for architects, structural engineers and developers working on footprints small enough that the answer changes the building. The honest answer takes a few minutes to give properly. It starts with what the column is actually holding. What a Corner Column Is Actually Holding Under gravity alone the corner column is the least consequential column on the perimeter. It collects load from a quarter of a bay where an interior column collects a full one, and on that arithmetic it looks like the easiest thing on the floor to delete. Under wind it is doing something else. A tall building resists overturning by pushing down...

By Michael Stern, JDS Development Group Put two of our buildings beside each other on a single variable, which is how much of the new work a person standing on the sidewalk can actually see. The Brooklyn Tower rises from the landmark Dime Savings Bank, and everything added there is visible from several neighborhoods away. Walker Tower is a Ralph Walker Art Deco telephone building conversion that added roughly 50,000 square feet, and almost none of that area announces itself to someone on the street below. That difference is not a matter of taste. On a designated building, new work above the existing roof is reviewed for what can be seen from the public way, so the shape of a rooftop addition is generated by lines of sight rather than by the floor plate that wants the area. This is for developers looking at a designated building with unused area above it, and for the architects and preservation consultants who will have to draw the thing. What a Rooftop Addition Is Measured Agai...

By Michael Stern, JDS Development Group A bid set for an unusual building goes out to a short list of contractors, and the first thing that comes back is a list of questions. Sometimes that list runs to several pages, and it arrives well before the date the numbers are due. Developers, construction managers and architects working on buildings with few precedents learn to read it as the first honest feedback the documents have ever had. Reading it that way is possible only because competitive bidding has a formal question period built into it. That period exists for a reason worth understanding before the first answer gets written. Why Bidding Acquired a Formal Question Period Competitive bidding rests on a single assumption, which is that every firm pricing the work is pricing the same work. The assumption holds only if every firm is reading the same documents and reading them the same way. Nothing about a drawing set guarantees that on its own. A drawing is a description o...

By Michael Stern, JDS Development Group The building code carries a table that sets how tall a building may be and how large its floors may be for each type of construction it allows. Read that table beside the zoning for a site and the smaller number is often the code one, which means the top of the building was decided by a construction document rather than by the envelope rules. I am writing this for developers and architects working on constrained sites in the middling heights, where the two documents disagree and only one of them can be satisfied last. What the Height and Area Tables Actually Govern The code sorts buildings by what they are made of and how well that material is protected from fire. Each type carries a permitted height and a permitted floor area per story, and the use of the building moves those numbers again. Nothing in that table is about light, air, bulk or the street, which is the whole business of the model codes a body like the International Code Council ...