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built a gym five to seven years ago was any urban design issues.And the more because the janitorial staff will be designated the maln decision-maker multipurpose the building Is, the more tempted to spray water instead of since he'd been through the process. possible tradeoffs there are." damp-mopping, thereby rusting the Then, halfway through the project, the It Is for this reason that Cannon- lockers. In these cases, the architect's g committee hired someone as operations Parkin's Body believes that many of the pretty helpless because people don't manager who had run these types of things commonly called mistakes are in always agree." I j buildings before,and he had a totally dif- reality mere differences of opinion. These facilities sometimes undergo ferent idea of how it should be designed." "Apart from the very obvious ones, I unfortunate changes after they're con- "Sometimes mistakes happen with a do think in many cases one man's error structed,like the one Wiggins saw,built change of client," agrees Oberlander. is another man's preference," says with beautiful clerestories that were "You design it to one key person's Body. "A classic example is whether subsequently boarded up because of specs, the building gets built and that you have floor drains in a locker room glare that a portion of the staff found person leaves, and the person who or not. Some people like to have them unacceptable. comes In next thinks of those design because obviously if there's a spill "There is no question that the safest decisions differently." there's somewhere for the water to go, pool is one that either has no daylight- • Code-mandated mistakes. Louisiana, but some don't like to have drains ing or has just diffuse light from directly says Tulane's Canning, is one of a num- "A lot of facility owners are more program-and finance-oriented, and they really don't know about the bricks and sticks." ber of states requiring sprinkler sys- tems inside racquetball courts."We had one sprinkler head that got hit by a ball and bent enough that it started leaking," Canning says. "When maintenance was called in to fix it, someone turned an incorrect valve and we had 1,500 gal- lons of water on the wood floor before we were able to shut it off."Part of the floor had to be replaced, Canning reports. "And," he adds, "this is a very well-designed building." • Conflicting goals. "A poker game" is how Wiggins describes the design process."When you're dealing with a$6 million facility,there's give and take on both sides," says Wiggins. "The archi- tect has ideas about what he or she wants,and you've got ideas about what you want." Szostak says the struggle for archi- tects is in meeting the demands of the client and also keeping in mind the responsibility they feel toward the pub- lic at large. "As architects, we are taught that we're keepers of the flame,so to speak," Szostak says. "It's pretty well ingrained in us that these buildings are seen in a larger scope of the world,so a lot of the ` discussions we have about every proj- ect come down to a tradeoff.The best- operating facility is a big concrete-block box without any windows.We can come up with a very pragmatic list of things that will make a building the best4unc- tioning facility,except it will have no city or regional context, nor will it address Circle 23 on Reply Card August 1995 ATHLETIC BUSINESS 33