WHY Architecture has been named as a defendant in a new lawsuit by the Asian Art Museum Foundation of San Francisco after allegedly failing to meet the institution’s design goals for a $38 million expansion project that was completed in March of 2020.
The suit was first entered in the County Superior Court in 2021. News of the action was made public via a museum press release this week, wherein the Foundation provided further details on what they said was a breach of contract related to its plan for the project that went over budget due to subsequent repairs.
“[The Pavilion] was delivered late, and as originally constructed, it failed to meet even the minimum museum-quality standards: it leaked in multiple locations, its interior environment was of inadequate quality, and its rooftop terrace was unusable. It was only through substantial intervention by the Foundation, at its own significant cost, that these major issues were identified and corrected, and a first-class, museum-quality Pavilion was finally achieved,” the Foundation’s statement continued.
Swinerton Builders, who served as the contractor of the project, is the initiator of the suit. Their liability in simply adhering to WHY’s plans is at the center of the quandary. Both parties claim the opposite is at fault and that their contributions were carried off without flaw.
The Foundation further explains: “Swinerton claims that it is not responsible, and points to what it contends were incomplete and inadequate plans prepared by WHY. WHY denies those claims, and asserts that Swinerton failed to follow WHY’s designs and basic, standard construction practices. The Foundation is trapped in the middle. The Foundation’s aim is to ensure that, as the non-profit operator of the museum on behalf of the City of San Francisco, it recovers all of its losses incurred to overcome inexcusable project delays and to correct the project’s many deficiencies.”
The news comes as WHY prepares to embark on a major conceptual redesign of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s African and Oceanic galleries. Both WHY and Swinerton have declined to make any public statements at this time.
12 Comments
This could be interesting to follow. I think I’ve heard stories of WHY’s specifications being thin and relying on reviewing mock-ups of different parts of the building on site, but also any contractor of this type of project should be able to build an envelope that doesn’t leak* even absent a detail for every connection.
*ALL buildings leak. That’s different from excessive leaking due to poor envelope design and construction.
Swinerton is really awful to work with.
The teams I interacted with have a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of architects and builders on these types of projects. They want to work exactly to what is in the drawings with 0 collaboration or deviation, and are either unwilling or unable to engage in the typical RFI/ Mockup/ Site coordination process.
It seems that this fundamental misunderstanding extends all the way to their executive and legal teams as well.
If they got a pre-BIM set of drawings (tight, 0 extraneous information, relying on the skill and knowledge of fabricators to flesh things out through shop drawings and construction) they would all just be a bunch of fat white 50 year old men crying in their F-250 supercabs. Oh wait...
As a tangential interaction having worked a little on a design that someone else took though construction with them... this seems mostly accurate.
Yeesh, was there no local executive working with WHY on this?
WHy has a huge amount of turnover which must make projects of this type without outside technical support very challenging.
Yuck. Not fun. Does anyone know if WHY has been sued by a client before?
are there any photos of this? i can't seem to find anything despite it being built for 3 years.
I was wondering the same thing. I want to see if we can tell how poorly built it might be from photos!
This is a joke of a lawsuit. Seriously? As was stated in TC architects, don't, build.
This whole mess seems emblematic of everything wrong with how the conventional design-bid-build process works. Here we have an unsophisticated client who made a bunch of bad decisions with unrealistic budget expectations, an architect with terrible technical execution and quality control practices, and a contractor who is notorious for poor business practices (we all know what Swinerton's nickname is, right?).
This is Google maps views before and after:
How does the client not study the plans before signing off on them?
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