And The Aftermath
Hurricane Sandy just passed through here, and while I don’t know how much damage it did to my area, it seems likely from the amount of flooding in the area that many homes and businesses near the water have been damaged. The question now becomes, why bother with an architect when all I need to do it repair my building? There are a lot of reasons to hire an architect at this point, some of them good value propositions, some of them just meeting legal requirements.
The most common reason you might need an architect (or engineer) is that your building never met code to begin with. In this situation, many municipalities will take this opportunity for rebuilding to bring your building up to compliance with modern codes. Depending on the level of damage and amount of repair involved, they may require complete structural upgrading or just moderate upgrades to the damaged components. They will probably require a licensed design professional to sign off on your proposed repairs, and getting one involved from the beginning is your best chance of doing it for a reasonable budget. After all, insurance pays out to replace what you lost, not to make it better, so getting an advacate who knows how to negotiate with the people in power (who are typically swamped after this sort of situation) could save you time and money. We don’t always win the arguements, but we do know how to make sure we don’t make things worse.
If your building is utterly destroyed, bringing an architect in early can maximize your rebuilding effort. This sort of project is often wonderful because an owner has lived on that lot for years and wants to rebuild most of what they had prior to the disaster, but with some changes. Sometimes it’s about replacing the crawlspace with a basement, sometimes about switching the floors or moving rooms to capture light, wind, or views, and sometimes it’s just about rebuilding it as it was, but stronger for the next storm. In any of these cases, getting a design professional involved can help spread that insurance pay out and get bang for your buck. I’ve seen projects where the final design for an improved house came in under the insurance payout for the old one (not in any way a guarantee, especially after a bad disaster when construction rates tend to rise dramatically.)
Sandy doesn’t appear to be that bad yet, but I have heard of hurricanes or other natural distasters devastating areas so badly that design professionals start to take on the roles of civic buearacrats (planning and zoning, building inspectors, etc.) The demand for rebuilding is so great, that they create exceptions allowing architects to start to enforce the rules for them (which is a real time saver) or even take the opportunity to redesign the layout of blocks, districts or cities. The best example I know of is New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, but it has happened many times. Architects can even be tasked with designing inexpensive temporary housing or public facilities to take the place of more permanant structures while rebuilding efforts start.
Are architects as useful as a team of skilled contractors to rebuilding efforts, probably not, after all, we can design all day, but you need someone to actually build it. But we can be your best ally (even better than your insurance agent) after a disaster if you include us in your rebuilding efforts.
