22 Different Kinds of Light Bulbs?!
Bridging the Capital-Operating Divide
The Story
I love Christopher Nolan’s epic Sci-Fi adventure film, Inception. The story is about a man named Cobb who has learned how to make a lot of money by entering into the dreams of important people and stealing their secrets. Key to the process is the architecture of the dreamscapes he creates for his subjects, but it’s not that simple: The people whose dreams Cobb hopes to enter have the kind of wealth that allows them to employ security services that protect them in their dreams. So, when Cobb takes his team into someone’s dream, they must penetrate through multiple levels of dreams—and dream security—each level with its own distinct architecture. This makes “the architect” a very important member of the team. Early in the movie, Cobb meets with a young woman named Ariadne, the most promising student at an architecture school in Paris, whom he hopes to hire to take over the role of architect. He was the original architect, but for reasons we learn later, he cannot do it any longer, as the last job was botched and a team member was killed because of his architecture. As a part of her job interview, Cobb and Ariadne enter a dream together, and she quickly demonstrates her skill by having the city of Paris wrap up and over the two of them as they sit and talk at a sidewalk café table. As they walk around Paris together, she creates more architectural marvels, each better than the last. Cobb explains to her that the more the designer of the dreamscape bends reality and physics, the more likely the subject’s subconscious is to notice the intrusion, at which point it will protect itself by creating projections—people that can turn hostile. Then Ariadne goes too far, creating a scene that leads to her being attacked and almost killed by a projection of Cobb’s deceased wife, Mal. His message is, don’t overdo it: Rather, focus on elegant, operational simplicity, and resist the urge to show off and design flashy things that are overcomplicated, as they create instability in the dream world, and that’s bad. Real bad, as Ariadne almost learned the hard way. Cobb’s bigger point to her is that the architecture is a means to an end—stealing the secret—not an end in itself.
Here’s Another Story: I led a group that managed capital projects for a number of city agencies in Philadelphia, one of which was the police department. The first thing the deputy commissioner wanted to talk to me about was the last new precinct building that had been completed a couple of years before. It was beautiful and had won a couple of local design awards, but there had been some challenges that were rooted in a lack of understanding between the architect, the police, and the city’s property management staff, over how the building would be maintained. This led to design decisions by the architect that would have unforeseen impacts later. One thing I had already learned in my job was that when you are designing a city building, it helps to imagine how it would hold up if, after all the contractors had left, no one came back for twenty or thirty years. The other thing I had learned to imagine was how a building would be maintained, because other than some basic janitorial and maintenance services, much of the work falls to the people who work there.
And this is why the cops wanted to talk to me about that last building. They had a list of issues, but the biggest had to do with lighting. First, the lobby of the station had a very high ceiling, as befits a civic building, but this meant that the only way to change the light bulbs on the ceiling was with a scissor lift. The second thing had to do with the light bulbs themselves. The architect and their lighting designer had specified a variety of different fixtures—some utilitarian and others more decorative—for the public areas, like the lobby. The problem was that, altogether, the different fixtures throughout the building required 22 unique types of bulbs or “lamps.” The solution to the first problem was that a paint-spattered old scissor lift had taken up semi-permanent residence in the corner of the beautiful lobby. The problem with the bulbs was multi-fold. First, the building lacked the storage space needed to stock spares of all 22 types of bulbs (not to mention ceiling tiles, carpet squares, and other types of surplus materials, sometimes called “attic stock”). Second, and more important, some of the bulbs were exotic and difficult to procure, and some came only from Europe and Asia. Unfortunately, the problem didn’t reveal itself until the first exotic bulb blew out, a year or two after occupancy. While all the light fixtures and their bulbs were bought at one time as a part of the construction contract, their replacements would have to be obtained through the city’s procurement department (see my post about procurement), which did not have contracts with vendors that provided all of the different types of bulbs. If you were the captain of that precinct—or Cobb, from Inception—you could be forgiven if you came to think that painted concrete block walls and 2x4 ceiling grids with 4’ long fluorescent tubes offered more than enough variety for what you and your officers needed to do your jobs in that building.
The Theory
That story is old, and we have all progressed from incandescent and fluorescent bulbs, through compact fluorescents, and into LEDs, which might eliminate some of the problem. But the bigger issue remains: More often than not, buildings are designed by architects working with a capital budget, who have little to no insight into how the building will be operated and maintained, who will do that work, and what it will cost over the life of the building. Old institutions like Philadelphia City Government have typically lagged even further behind the private sector in closing what I like to call “the capital-operating divide,” although the emphasis on sustainability and green design in the past three decades has narrowed it significantly. Still, architects sometimes make design decisions based on their budget without having much of a sense of how those decisions will impact what has come to be known as the Life Cycle Cost (LCC) and Whole Life Cost (WLC) of an asset.
The term Life Cycle Cost (LCC) was first coined in the 1960s, when project decisions were typically based on acquisition costs only: Land acquisition and the design and construction of the building. LCC sought to account for those costs, as well as the costs of operating and maintaining a building over its ownership period. These costs include smaller but recurring expenses, like energy and utility charges, taxes, insurance, maintenance, repairs, and capital improvements. Among other things, LCC highlights the impact that design decisions at the beginning of a project have on recurring costs over the life of a building—such as the choice of light fixtures and bulbs. When all costs are added up and evaluated in terms of current dollars, operations and maintenance costs often surpass the original capital costs. The basic idea behind LCC is to know ALL the costs at the beginning and use that information to modify the design to reduce operating costs over the long term. While LCC accounts for the ownership period of a building, for example 30 years, including sale at the end, Whole Life Cost (WLC) extends the analysis to account for the life of the building—through multiple owners and uses—from initial design and construction through decommissioning, inspections, abatement, demolition, and site cleanup – a period that can last decades or even centuries. An understanding of LCC and WLC can lead to the design and construction of a building that will meet the needs of the users at the lowest cost.1
The Lesson
The first lesson is that before you design a building, you should understand how it will be maintained, who will be doing that work, and, if possible, you should get to know those people—they will have knowledge and opinions. Second, you should understand the client’s expectations in terms of first costs vs. annual operating budget. Some institutional clients that plan to own a building for the long term may be willing to overspend on capital, for example, better exterior materials, insulation, windows, and mechanical systems, if it will lower their operating budget over the long term. Conversely, some developers plan to sell a building as soon as it has been completed and leased up or “stabilized,” so they have less of an incentive to think about long-term operating costs, although underwriters have become more sophisticated about valuing properties that take these costs into account, leading developers to design more carefully. Either way, if you don’t know the total cost—the life cycle cost—of a potential capital vs. operating decision, then you are likely to be badly surprised in the long run. More importantly, only by looking at life cycle cost can you make the best decisions during the design phase. And like Ariadne in Inception, the best policy is often to design for elegant operational simplicity rather than for perfection.
“In a dream, you can cheat architecture into impossible shapes. That lets you create closed loops, like the Penrose Steps. The infinite staircase.”
- Arthur, in Inception
Q: How many architects does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Why would you want a light bulb there?
Garcez, Mônica Regina, “Economic Performance of Buildings Through Life Cycle Costing,” in the Journal of Urban and Environmental Engineering, 2022, 16(1), page 3-14.