by Douglas Gordon, Hon. AIA
Executive Editor

Summary: Alan Stover has been involved with the AIA Contract Documents program since 1975 as a student intern, staff director, consultant, and member volunteer. In those capacities, he has been instrumental in the expansion of the scope and flexibility of the documents from the days of paper-only versions to the current families of documents available online for projects small and large and the wide variety of project delivery options in use today. Most recently, he is the principal author of the Official Guide to the AIA Contract Documents, published this year. Here he shares his memories and insights into the past third of a century of development of the AIA Contract Documents.

How did you become involved in the AIA Documents program in the 1970s?

I was working at an architecture firm and still in law school when I applied for a summer internship at the AIA in what was then called Practice Programs in the Professional Practice Department. That was the division that had responsibility for the AIA Documents. I was at the AIA for two weeks when my boss left, so I was at the AIA all summer and into the fall on my own and so assumed responsibility for the AIA Documents Division programs. At that time, we produced documents on an IBM Selectric typewriter.

From that time, the Documents Division has been a testing ground for technological innovations in office equipment and has since gone through many iterations of technology. When the first PC came out, there were two at the Institute, one in the executive vice president’s office and one in accounting. However, a few of us on staff brought in our own portable PCs to use on the job in anticipation of them becoming more widespread.

You are still involved in the Documents Program, which is still pushing the technological envelope, going great lengths to make operations easy for the end user. What is your opinion of online availability of the documents as a member service?

It’s been quite a revolution and a long time coming. For many, many years all we produced were paper documents, and there was a reluctance to go electronic for fear that that might encourage people to create documents on their own word processors. Actually, what I found in my own practice was that in every major city there would be two or three law firms that already had the documents and had transcribed them onto their own word processors. So the horse was already out of the barn before the AIA Electronic Documents system came out.

Part of the reason for the Electronic Documents system was to ensure that the basic documents were still preserved, and changes and additions would still be visible. And that was an outgrowth of the same procedure we already had in place when I came here. We’d have requests, for instance, from government agencies that wanted to develop a set of general conditions but wanted it to be their general conditions. So we would give them permission to do so, provided that they showed the changes with underlining and strikeouts. That same method is what was adopted when we finally offered electronic documents. It’s worked fairly well and, from the numbers I’ve seen, they are very popular.

You’ve been involved in so many things throughout your career. How do you balance your legal practice, consulting services, and volunteer work? You must be incredibly busy all the time.

I’m pretty busy, but the balance has been fairly constant from the outset. I tell people that if it weren’t for architecture, I wouldn’t be interested in law. I’m first an architect, and becoming a lawyer was basically an extension of that. I really didn’t learn the connection between the law and architecture until after I got to the AIA and was put in the hot seat.

I might have an experienced lawyer from the other side of the country calling to ask detailed questions about the documents. Luckily, that person couldn’t see how young and inexperienced I was. And, if I didn’t know the answer, I’d have to get the answer within 24 or 48 hours and get back to these callers. I was forced to learn at a very fast pace.

When, at that early point in my career, I was seeing all the things that could happen to an architect or that could go wrong on a construction project, it was almost enough to make me afraid to practice architecture. I wondered how these people could survive. You have to keep in mind, though that even with so many bad things that can happen, realistically, it only happens to the unfortunate few. Still, it was pretty intense because I was not only dealing with the contract documents, I was also dealing with the AIA liability insurance program, so I was seeing all the legal entanglements people could get into. And there were not very many lawyers knowledgeable in architectural design and construction, much less lawyers that our members felt they could trust, so they would call the AIA when seeking advice. Of course, we would have to make it clear that we were not in a position to give legal advice and that callers would have to seek their own legal counsel. Our position was to provide an interpretation of the documents.

One of the interesting things about reading the newly released Guide to AIA Documents is that you do bridge the gap between lawyer and layman. You talk about the documents in a way that an architect can understand, and, at the end, there are essentially legal briefs that are heavily footnoted and that thoroughly reference case law.

We have to give the lawyers something!

How did you achieve a balance between legal discussions and architectural practice with that book? I ask because there are some pretty dense topics that are presented very clearly, for instance a relatively short piece on standard of care we reprinted in AIArchitect. (click to read)

Even though I wrote virtually all of the Guide to AIA Documents, supplemented with articles from the AIA staff, we were very diligent in editing to make sure I wasn’t saying something too lawyerly for our readers, or, for that matter, outdated about the diverse practice processes as they exists now.

Speaking of developments in project delivery, what do you think about the newly emerging integrated project delivery approach?

I haven’t been involved in any projects like that. Of course, the documents that the AIA has developed are intentionally transitional, yet it’s certainly an approach that’s worth looking at. Although no project delivery approach by itself will be a panacea to all of the complications that will arise, it has a lot of promise.

When I first started at the AIA, it was a time when practice and delivery methods were just starting to diversify from the three-legged stool, owner-architect-contractor approach of design-bid-build. Construction management documents were emerging, and, ultimately, the design-build documents. So, up until the 1970s, the AIA docs were basically “one size fits all,” which was in keeping with the needs of most competitively bid projects. As the industry started to change, it meant that flexibility had to be brought into the document somehow.

The approach the AIA took was to create alternative documents. It was just too much to expect anybody to be able to modify a standard set of documents to be appropriate for an alternative approach such as construction management. So that is how the first families of different documents got their start in the mid-1970s. Since then, there has been a vast expansion of the documents program to keep pace with the many innovations in project delivery. In the book, I charted the documents along a timeline, which basically shows a logarithmic curve as new families were added over the decades. Now we have over a hundred AIA documents to reflect that diversity.

Another publication I edited in the 1970s was The Architect’s Handbook of Professional Practice, about two-thirds of which, at that time, concentrated on the documents, in addition to other office practice topics. The Handbook was very closely related to the documents and, for that reason, was in a loose-leaf format, so when we would issue a new document we would come up with a new chapter in the Handbook dealing with the intent of that document. When the Handbook has been hardbound, which it is again now, you can only publish the whole thing at one time, so it falls out of synch with the issuance of the documents. That’s probably all right, because the AIA Documents Committee has a huge workload just doing the documents, without having also to write updates to the Handbook chapters.

What’s interesting, despite all the variations we’ve seen since the 1970s, is that if you look at the history of the documents from the first AIA Handbook of Practice, published in 1917, is that there are so many basic principles in the documents that have remained unchanged for a century. There were certain expectation of the architect and the owner and the contractor that were in place even 150 years ago when the founders first incorporated the AIA, and that are still in place now. How those principles got established may be lost to history. Maybe they developed here; maybe some of them had been standard practice in Great Britain and Europe, and we adopted those practices as the profession of architecture took root in this country. Either way, I’d say it’s possible to take 95 percent of the very first documents, and you can still see them in the current documents.

A lot of the current developments in project delivery are founded in technological advancements. For instance, building information modeling makes IPD possible. Where once you simply couldn’t process that much information in a meaningful way, now you can both process it and share it in real time among all team members. Where do you see the future of creating the built environment?

I’ve been waiting for the future to arrive for the last 25 years. We have this imagined architectural heritage of the Howard Roark individualist creator with an overriding focus on design aesthetics. Although design acuity is a part of what distinguishes the architect from others on the building team, at the same time, the world doesn’t often put design aesthetic at the pinnacle of project-delivery decision making. We must work in teams. We must work collectively. The Frank Lloyd Wrights and Howard Roarks really don’t exist any more, if they ever really did, and that’s not what the role of the architect is. If the architect wants to be a leader then he or she must maintain the cutting edge of technology.

We’ve had building information modeling capability for 25 years, ever since you could assign attributes in a CAD file, which is nothing more than a big database. Once we got beyond computer-aided drafting—programs that did little more than connect two dots and make a line out of it—we were able to include other information, such as the nature of the line; not just its weight, but what it actually represents. As CAD developed into and beyond 3D capabilities it became a real visualization tool that could serve the architect’s purposes and, beyond that, the interests of the owner, engineer, and constructor.

With owners awakening to the capabilities these technologies offer, architects are appreciating the financial incentive of employing CAD in a BIM sense. Owners who want an information source that can serve from project conceptualization through occupancy and operations are driving a new appreciation of these fairly well-established tools. So architects have to be conscious of that, take advantage of that, and be able to build upon that if they want to regain and maintain their centrality to the entire process.

Design and construction in this country has had a great history that we can draw from today. It was during the turn of the previous century, in the late 1890s to 1910s, when the entire building industry underwent a dramatic change parallel to the Industrial Revolution, as central heating, indoor plumbing, and electric lighting and vertical conveyance became commonplace. Buildings had to be done in a different way, and architects had to provide more specialized services beyond directing the work of all the separate trades. The realm of general contractors emerged. And the AIA Contract Documents were there to formalize the relationships. Much more recently, as design, coordination, and installation of building systems continued to become increasingly complicated, cost-sensitive, and quick, owners turned to construction managers to provide direction at the site. And the contract documents acknowledged the new interrelationships. And, too, with design-build or even IPD, are we doing things altogether differently or are we finding new ways to accomplish the same goals: creating buildings that serve their purpose and an environment that protects the public health, safety, and welfare? Is anything really new? Or is it simply a matter of how you package things?

To go back to the question of my balancing architectural problem solving and lawyering, it is really a matter of looking at contract development as a design problem; even if the contract has nothing to do with construction. The problem with writing alone is that writing is a linear process and design is something that is 3, 4, or 10 dimensional, and very intuitive. For instance, you could take flow charting techniques and apply that to a contract, then you would start to see whether a contingency had been taken care of … maybe the “yes” goes somewhere but where does the “no” go? It’s that kind of approach to the problem that I think we have seen in the AIA documents themselves.

The documents are not written by lawyers, they are written by architects, and, hopefully, they are written so they are understood by others in the construction industry. Certainly the documents are bigger than any of us and will be around for longer than any of us. So, by their nature, the documents have little quirks in them that somebody down the road will look at and ask: “Why did they put this in there?” That’s part of what I tried to answer in the book; outside of the Architect’s Handbook of Professional Practice, which generally has been descriptive of the documents but not really explanatory. Hopefully, the Guide will answer those “why” questions. Often I see contracts that lawyers have marked up or changed, and you can see they missed the whole point of it. Or, and this happens often, they will modify one thing without understanding that this paragraph relates to another paragraph within the contract family, which goes back to the flow chart concept. If you look at just one branch of it, then you miss all the interrelationships. I do find it all fascinating, which is why the documents have held my attention for 35 years. I am pleasantly surprised to see how much the documents program has grown as a force in the industry. It’s really an Institute mainstay, and that’s great. They must be doing something right.