In the early 1960s Harold Adams, DBIA chairman in 2005, worked as an architect for John Carl Warnecke, who ran a San Francisco architectural firm. Warnecke, himself an architect and friend of President and Mrs. Kennedy, was selected for a particular project on the north side of the White House and chose Adams as his Washington liaison.
The Lafayette Square Project was a large initiative to restore the office blocks on each side of the square and the square itself. While the Warnecke’s San Francisco office handled much of the project’s work, Adams was the go-to man in the nation’s capitol.
Young and fresh out of school, Adams says he was typically idealistic about this tremendous opportunity, particularly in working directly with the Kennedys on various aspects of the project. But it quickly became baptism by fire as the project began, and it was an experience that lives with Adams to this day. It was instrumental in shaping his attitudes toward building projects, and established a foundation upon which he built his thoughts about design-build.
It started when, after many meetings with the Kennedys about the project, Adams had to meet with the contractor.
“This was a project for the General Services Administration [and] the contractor … arrives in a Rolls Royce, comes in chomping on a big cigar - eating it, not smoking it - and immediately informs us that we are behind schedule in processing all of the shop drawings and that they have a number of issues that they are going to issue change orders on,” Adams says. “This is the first meeting, and it went downhill from there.”
Adams says he learned later that the contractor did not bid projects with estimators and architects and engineers. He instead worked with lawyers looking for loopholes in drawings and specifications.
“[He] was notorious for being a very low bidder on government projects and then getting it all back, and more, through change orders,” Adams says. “I’ll always remember that, [it was] burned as an image in my brain.”
But his work on the Lafayette Square Project wasn’t forgotten.
“I worked personally with the president for several days helping him select a site for his presidential library, and then after his assassination, I was the project architect on his grave in Arlington,” Adams says. “I was overwhelmed; it was an incredible experience.”
The work on the president’s grave was a particular honor.
“In every meeting during the design of the president’s grave, which lasted - we had meetings with every member of the family, the Cabinet, multiple other people over a year and a half period,” he says. “[They were] very sensitive issues, because we were dealing with a family that was grieving, a nation that was grieving, and architects are rarely called on to design graves.” But Adams says it was more than a grave: “It had turned into a national shrine.”
These experiences, that would fill anyone’s career, just signaled the beginning for Adams. They gave him early perspectives about the business. And when he was named president of RTKL at age 29, he was even more enlightened about the positives - and problems - in the building and design process.
It wasn’t long before he began realizing design-build could solve problems before they occur - and also lessen the impact of setbacks when they do occur. By the early 1970s, Adams began working on some design-build projects. In one instance — a year or two after a building was complete - there was a leakage problem.
“The CEO called us, very upset that there was water on the carpet in his office,” Adams says. “He was indeed pretty mad because he would roll his chair around behind his desk and you could hear the water squish.”
But one meeting with the CEO and the contractor, and the design-build process proved its worth. “In any other circumstance, that would have been a lawsuit ... that would have cost everybody a lot of money,” Adams says. “Out on the sidewalk right under the building [the contractor] said ‘I think we can fix this for $30,000; you pay $10,000, we’ll take care of the rest.’” That was it.
“Now, what we spent to do that would not have gotten us a month into a legal battle,” Adams says. He became convinced very early of two things: The system was broken; and there were other ways of doing projects.
But the quest for design-build acceptance and the realization of its value is still elusive, and Adams knows that building relationships early on can help open the doors to better cooperation and acceptance of design-build.
“I think there’s still a long crusade to get the barriers down, to get people thinking and working in a more interdisciplinary way,” he says.
For his part, Adams has established three professorships at his alma mater, Texas A&M, in interdisciplinary studies. One is in architecture, one is in construction science, and one in planning and landscape architecture.
“The whole reason for that is to see a school that has all the disciplines and some of the most successful architects as well as some of the most successful planners and some of the most successful constructors coming out of that school,” Adams says. “Yet the educators … they’re still teaching in silos. And we’ve got to break down those silos and have people thinking as a team and working as a team.”
It’s a philosophy he has remembered since his early days in Washington, where he forged his early career.
“The man I worked for, John Carl Warnecke, was a wonderful person to give young people opportunities and that kind of exposure,” Adams says. “He had started out with his father who was an architect and his father was a mentor to him, and Jack was a mentor to me.”