by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Dennis J. Hall, FAIA, FCSI, CCS, CCCA, is founder and managing principal of Hall Architects Inc., in Charlotte. Hall is an award-winning architect and construction specifier, with more than 20 design and specification awards, including the Young Architects Award from the AIA South Atlantic Region and four national specification awards, including two Honor Awards from the Construction Specifications Institute. He currently is senior editor of Architectural Graphic Standards, 11th edition, and previously chaired the MasterFormat Expansion Task Team, the North American effort to expand the industry standard for organizing specifications. He also serves on the OmniClass Construction Classification System (OCCS) Development Committee and the National Institute of Building Sciences’ National CAD Standard Project Committee, where he is co-chair of the External Libraries Committee.

Education: My undergraduate degrees are in architecture and geography from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I spent a couple of years working, then went back to school and earned an MArch from Washington University in St. Louis.

Years in practice: I’ve been in continuous practice since the summer of 1980, so that would be 27 years.

Last book read: Right now, I am the senior editor for Architectural Graphic Standards—the one that’s coming out on March 16—so for the last four months, practically all I have been doing is reading Architectural Graphic Standards. It’s a little over 1,000 pages and we’ve read it cover to cover a couple of times.

Next read: Just yesterday I opened a book on new classicalism in architecture. I think the name of it was New Classicalism. I bought it last summer when I was on vacation. It had made its way to my bookshelf and has finally moved onto my desk.

Professional influences: A number of people whom I have met have had a great deal of influence: college professors, of course. In the Charlotte area, Jeff Huberman, FAIA, would be one person. I’ve never worked for Jeff, but have known him professionally. Nationally, I would say Robert Johnson, AIA, who is an architect in Albuquerque. He was with RTKL in Baltimore, and I knew him through the Construction Specifications Institute.

Another local architect is Nick Vrettos, who was a boss of mine in the construction administration department at Little & Associates. That was a period in my life when I had been licensed to practice but, like many architects, just because the state says that you are legally capable of practicing architecture, doesn’t mean that you really need to go out and do it. Under Nick, [I gained] experience in seeing how buildings are actually put together and how all the contract documents work together. There was one day when the light bulb seemed to come on and I thought, “Wow, this is really cool. People thought about how this stuff works.” Everything started making sense. That was an interesting time.

On becoming involved with CSI and MasterFormat: After Nick, my boss was Harry Williams, president of the Charlotte chapter of CSI. One day, Harry said, “Dennis how’d you like to be a member of CSI?” I said, “Harry I’ve always wanted to be a member of CSI. What is CSI?” From that, I became a member and attended the national convention, almost by luck. The educational programs were so fantastic and people were sharing knowledge. That’s how the AIA was founded 150 years ago—by 13 architects in New York who wanted to share knowledge to improve the profession and how we all practice to the benefit of our clients, our building projects, and ourselves.

A few years later, after I had left Little, I joined up with a couple other guys and began our practice. We needed someone to write specifications, and in a 2-1 vote, I was elected. I decided that if I was going to have to write specifications, then I’d better learn how to do it properly. CSI provided the means and education to help me do that. About five years into that, one of our project manuals won a national CSI specifications competition. The next thing I knew, I was asked to serve on a national committee. One thing led to another—I got to go to meetings and hang out with some incredibly smart people. They were so much smarter than I was and they were happy to share information and knowledge. Through that, I got smarter and better at doing my job. Eventually, I was asked to chair the MasterFormat expansion team in 2001, when it started up.

On architects and MasterFormat: I think that architects are generally becoming more familiar with it, but there’s still plenty of education that’s needed. It affects architects, engineers, contractors, material suppliers. It affects everyone in the life cycle of the facility. MasterFormat is going to be part of the national building information model standard, so people are adjusting to that language as well as something called OmniClass, which is a broader classification system that describes all objects that are related to the built environment from various points of view throughout the entire life cycle of the facility, whereas MasterFormat predominantly deals with mostly the construction phase. I think that we as architects are evolving along with our technology and we’re going to have to be looking at our buildings, not just from the standpoint of our designing them, they’re constructed, and we hand them over to the owners. The information that we create during the design phase becomes the DNA of that building, which lives on throughout the life of that building. How we are now thinking about our professional services and our instruments of service and how that DNA lives is changing the way that architects are going to be practicing in the next few years.

Will MasterFormat and BIM integrate more easily: Absolutely. No question about it. MasterFormat is definitely being integrated into the building information model, and into the national BIM standard that is currently being developed by NIBS. We’re really going to have to make information interoperable so that we only have to input it into the model one time. Then it will continue to live, not only as that information, but [so that it also] can be manipulated and used to create essential knowledge.

The future of specifications: Specifications are going to continue to exist. They will evolve. When we think about specifications today, we think about the project manual, which is a bound book of printed information that provides the administrative and quality requirements of that facility. That information is going to be digitally linked to the graphics, but a project manual will, I believe, still exist, but merely as a report, such as drawings and plans will be a report. Spreadsheets, cost estimates: these are all various reports that are generated from the database model, so we’re going to have to be able to generate specifications in printed form, tabular form, or in graphic form to continue to provide the administrative and quality requirements of the project. They will evolve as our drawings have evolved from being generated by pencil to being generated electronically in a CAD program to building information model and later beyond that into a facility lifecycle model.

On specifications in architecture education: I think that we’re dealing with two issues. One is education and the other is training—and most schools of architecture think of those as two separate issues. I think most architecture schools, at least at the undergraduate level, are concerned with the general education. At some point in time, we’re going to have to deal with the training of architects. How do you take that raw talent that has this general understanding of architecture and actually make these people architects? Is that going to happen at the graduate level where we’re going to move into various specialties? Very possibly. Today that happens in the firm, sometimes more successfully than other times.

That’s one of the great things about organizations such as the AIA and CSI. I think we’re starting to recognize that we’re going to have to provide training beyond architecture education, whether that’s through CSI certification classes in specifications or through education in the national CAD standard through the AIA, NIBS, CSI, and other organizations. I think we’re going to see some of the specialty areas become more formalized in the near future [with] training requirements more closely allied. Will the universities do that? Will the professional and industry organizations do that? Will the firms do that? We don’t know the answer yet. I think that the professional and industry organizations are probably the ones that are going to have to lead it. Today I don’t see that coming from the universities.

Advice for young architects: Get smart. There’s no knowledge that’s not good knowledge. I think that architects are going to continue to be both generalists and specialists. Some will become specialists in particular building design types. Others may choose to get into the technical end of the business, but I think we’re going to see more and more specialists. Eventually, we will probably see [architects] becoming similar to doctors, specialized and having credentials in certain areas, whether that’s high-rise construction, or criminal justice construction, or whatever. Young architects need to understand how their buildings go together and how their specialty relates back to that general practice of architecture.