A good building, hopefully a great building, is always a synthesis of a powerful or an insightful imagination combined with technological expertise. It’s simply not possible to conceive of the great buildings of the past in a context that’s divorced from a mastery of the materials that they were working with in those times.
It’s every bit as true today, whether we’re dealing with laboratories, housing or it’s restoring and preserving historic works, every building type today is increasingly more complex. It’s a snowballing phenomenon that’s been occurring pretty much since the end of World War II. In this office, we have a number of different centers of expertise that have individuals in them that get up every morning to try and figure out how to do it right, how to do it better, and how to do it more cost-effectively.
I learn from the contractors and the subcontractors every time I go to a job site. With every passing day, I learn something new, and I’ve been at this for over 30 years and it amazes me. Sometimes it’s the most mundane thing, and other times it’s just transcendental. I think our library has over three or four thousand volumes in it, and it just keeps growing. It’s like a fire hose of information that’s directed at us every day.
Lord, Aeck & Sargent has an in-house construction materials and specifications expert. Richard, a principal at Lord, Aeck & Sargent is a nationally recognized expert in this field.
He coauthored the American Institute of Architect’s SweetSpec and Heery International’s SpecSystem, the first automated, interactive, knowledge-based specifications writing systems for architects and engineers. Richard has led seminars on advanced specification-writing techniques in major cities coast to coast. He has also been awarded the Ben John Small Award, the Construction Specifications Institute’s highest honor for “special proficiency and outstanding stature as a practicing specification writer.”
Richard serves as a materials specialist for many of the firm’s projects, particularly those historic in nature, and provides conditions assessments, masonry remediations, stone repair and forensic investigations, among other services.
