The Usual Schematics

Prototypical plans versus custom designs

By Scott Rhode

ittle boxes made of ticky tacky need not all look the same, but they often do. Everyone has had the experience of visiting a friend’s home and recognizing the layout. Odds are the house was built from a familiar blueprint, such as the ranch or splitentry model.

One of the most popular models in Spinell Homes’ hundred-plan library is the 1452 Forget-Me-Not. “I can’t imagine that—if you’ve been in many houses, at least on the more affordable side—that you haven’t been in it,” says Andre Spinelli, president of the Anchorage building company. The 1452 Forget-Me-Not, so designated for its square footage, has been adapted as a duplex, four-plex, and six-plex, as well as stand-alone homes. Every builder has some version of it, Spinelli says.

Déjà vu designs are partly a consequence of the Pipeline Boom of the late ‘70s. “A lot of people coming to Alaska back in the day weren’t expecting to be here that long, so what happened was you got the cheapest, most costeffective house,” Spinelli explains. “People weren’t looking at it long term as ‘my forever home,’ and that’s what you see around Anchorage.”

The 1452 Forget-Me-Not “has been around since before I moved to Alaska, and it still gets built today. Granted, we update things and make tweaks,” Spinelli says. He credits Karen Cushman with drawing probably more house plans in Anchorage than anyone.

Rapid explosions of home-building are more infrequent these days. Spinelli has to think back to a recent housing development at Joint Base ElmendorfRichardson. “There’s five models of houses, and we’re gonna build 150 of these things,” he recalls. “My plumber told me, ‘Oh man, we got so good and so fast and efficient… You need to do this.’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, tell that to the home buyers.’”

As much as contractors would appreciate an assembly-line process, homes just aren’t built that way anymore. Spinelli’s experience has taught him that much. “I’m a design geek, so I think every lot has a plan that fits it, depending on slope, topography, views, access, or this or that,” he says.

Alike All Over

Institutional buildings will reuse blueprints, especially where governments want low-cost functionality. For example, the Anchorage Fire Department has three stations with the same floor plan. Fire Station 7 in the Jewel Lake neighborhood was replicated as Fire

Stations 14 and 15 on Campbell Airstrip Road and Southport Drive, respectively.

“The idea wasn’t necessarily to develop a prototype fire station,” says James E. Dougherty, managing principal for Alaska at RIM Architects. “The fire department really saw this as a good platform for a fire station and thought, ‘That’s pretty good. Rather than reinvent the wheel, why don’t we just do our next one the same.’”

Efficiency comes from encountering problems during the first build that can be avoided in subsequent builds. “They find something that works, and then they can build repeat models,” Dougherty explains. “Most things you build are one-offs, and you’re not able to capitalize on lessons learned from your first.”

Prototypes have saved costs for the Anchorage School District in the long term, as well. “There is some economy of maintenance in the downstream. You get a common floor plan with common elements, it’s easier for them to get in quickly and know what they need to do,” says Edie Knapp, the district’s construction supervisor.

Anchorage began dabbling in prototypes in the ‘60s, with schools like Campbell and O’Malley Elementary sprouting from the same seed but diverging in their final forms. Dougherty says the district had a tradition of drawing from prototypes, and oneoffs have been the exception. By the ‘80s, the district was using identical, or mirror-reversed, plans for Klatt, Spring Hill, Bear Valley, Ravenwood, and Fire Lake.

Larry Morris, the district’s planning and design supervisor, notes that maintenance for the fleet of buildings generally follows a predictable schedule as similar parts wear out. Commonality also helps the buildings’ users. “As teachers and principals move from school to school (and it could be for all kinds of staff, even custodians that move from a school to another school), if it’s similar, the learning curve gets a lot shallower,” Morris says.

Morris previously worked on school designs for the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District in the ‘80s and ‘90s. “Fairbanks had their own prototypicals that started with Badger

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Road Elementary. They built seven of them,” he says.

Anchorage replaced its ‘80s prototype through a design contest won by Dale Porath, co-founder of the firm that became Porath Tatom Architects. Schools built in the ‘90s using Porath’s design include Bowman, Tyson, Kasuun, Kincaid, a replacement for Russian Jack, and finally Trailside.

Jae Shin, principal and chief technology officer at KPB Architects in Anchorage, worked with Porath briefly. He recalls that the architect was proud to see his vision realized half a dozen times.

However, that contest was the first and last the district would use, and Porath’s design is unlikely to come off the shelf ever again. “If we were going to use that [design] again,” Knapp says, “we would need to update it to current code, current technology standards, that sort of stuff.”

The Trouble with Templates

The problem with prototypes is that every site is different. Dana Menendez, facilities planner for the Anchorage

School District, explains that designs must fit the site’s soils, elevation, and traffic access (to name a few factors), so a previously used plan is rarely ideal.

“You pull it off the shelf and put it on a site, the elements are there, the general design is there, but there would still be some design left to do,” she says.

Shin points to the replacement for Dr. Etheldra Davis Fairview Elementary, which he worked on as a project designer circa 1998. Although the Porath prototype existed, the new Fairview was built on a narrow slice of the lot while the old school was still standing. Thus, the replacement is two stories tall to fit a smaller footprint.

And forget about adapting the Anchorage prototype to the rest of Alaska. “We couldn’t set Bowman Elementary School in Bethel,” Menendez says.

She tried, though, as part of the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development’s [DEED] exploration of statewide prototype schools. A 2015 report to the legislature, authored by Nvision Architecture and Ohio research firm Dejong-Richter, concluded that “a statewide prototype school program would likely be unsuccessful given the insurmountable diversities influencing design and construction in the state in combination with the long-term projections of student population growth over the next 30 years.”

Much as the state might like to pay an architect once for an endlessly replicated school design, Menendez says, “We kind of came to the idea that there is no one right fit for all of Alaska.”

Standard Deviation

A follow-up to the 2015 report looked at setting statewide standards for model Alaska schools. Since 1993, DEED has conditioned bond reimbursement for local districts on certain costeffective construction criteria and energy efficiency standards. This rule could serve as a vehicle for defining school designs while allowing for local variation.

The first version of the design and construction standards was published last April, and architects were not impressed. Karen Zaccaro, a former teacher who transitioned to architecture as a senior project manager at Stantec, says her colleagues didn’t give enough input. “I felt like the design community did not pay enough attention to what was going on, and I think they [DEED] are closer to adopting them than a lot of people realize. And I think it has impact to overall education environments,” she says. “I think in some ways it might be a little too constrictive.”

The standards set ranges for floor area and ceiling height based on student population, for example, and define “premium” elements that would not qualify for reimbursement.

Examples of premium elements include sites with slopes greater than 10 percent; elaborate, expensive, curved, or complex walls, ceilings, windows, and arches; wood floors (except where allowed for gymnasiums), natural stone floors, or terrazzo; decorative ceiling systems such as metal or wood slat ceilings; and operable wall systems or full-height sliding doors. Standards for school auditoriums define orchestra pits, professional theater lighting, and black-box theaters as out-of-bounds for state reimbursement.

Zaccaro worked on the design ratio subcommittee. “They have a preferred window-to-wall ratio, looking at it specifically from an energy standpoint,” she says. “That’s a pretty low ratio, whereas in my experience, the research that I look at for education environments, natural daylight has a significant impact on users across the board.”

The standards as now written are “locking down some of the creativity,” says Shin. “And I don’t mean whimsical creativity just for the architect’s ego. I’m talking about the creativity in terms of actual design that will actually matter for the way that children are educated.”

The Most Expensive Square Foot

The era of school prototypes in Alaska has passed. “Typicals come into play when you’re in a growth of population and need to do new schools in a fairly quick amount of time. Then it makes it a lot easier,” says Morris. That time is not now.

With declining enrollment, the Anchorage School District is looking to close buildings, not make new ones. And when aging buildings are replaced, decades-old prototypes are out of step with new requirements.

“If you want to go through the pain and discipline of developing a prototype, you have to do it with the idea that you’ve got the funds to follow through with two or three or four examples, and that requires a certain amount of economic prosperity,” says Dougherty. “We’re just not economically in that space where we’re rapidly expanding, to where a prototype could save a lot of extra money and time.”

Reusing an existing blueprint might seem like a budget-minded strategy, but Zaccaro says the efficiency is illusory. “Design fees are similar for a prototype building compared to a sitespecific building; the difference in cost could be as little as 1 to 2 percent of the entire project,” she says. “Most would agree that is a good value for a customdesigned anything. So, even if you want to build the cheapest building, it’s still likely a better value to approach it for its intended purpose rather than fit it into a generic box.”

Or, as Zaccaro puts it more succinctly, “The most expensive square foot is the area you do not use.”

An off-the-shelf plan still requires a full redrafting to account for a code update, foundation design, utility connections, and other changes to be permitted, she adds.

Before computer-aided design, redrafting was even more expensive, so prototypes made more sense. “Plans were hand drawn back then. Once a builder had a plan… you just keep reproducing that same house over and over and over again,” says Spinelli. “Hand drawing a plan—a custom plan or tweaking a plan every time—was a pretty labor-intensive thing. It wasn’t the cost of redesigning the plan; it was more the time.”

Box from a Drawer

Architecture is a discipline that most people interface with once in their lives, if ever. “So some of the perceptions of those folks coming in is you just go to a drawer, pull out a plan that you like, and plop it on the site,” says Shin. “As designers, that’s not really how we like to approach projects.”

The pull-and-plop method was tried in the ‘90s by national chains during Anchorage’s retail explosion. However, most of those buildings have since been customized.

Zaccaro observes, “A lot of the chain restaurants and stores that come up here, they come up with the idea, ‘Oh, it shouldn’t cost anything. You just have to re-stamp it.’ And I’ve just never known it to be true. There’s so much you end up having to redo.”

Different needs and values over time can mutate prototypes. Consider the humble Walmart. Shin worked on three of them: in South Anchorage, Eagle River, and both the original and expansion locations at Seward Meridian Parkway, just outside Wasilla.

“How hard can it be? They’re just a box,” he says. “Even if it’s just a box, you’ve seen how they updated the façade so it’s more attractive. Before it was a plain-Jane Walmart; now it’s got what we call ‘ticky tacky’ decoration on the top.”

And the ticky tacky keeps the boxes from all looking the same.