State’s Top Architect to Speed Works

Quick. Who’s California’s state architect and what does he do?

If you didn’t know, don’t feel bad. He doesn’t receive anywhere near the attention accorded to Lt. Gov. Leo McCarthy, Treasurer Kathleen Brown or Controller Gray Davis.

In fact, interest in the office may be at a modern low. Granted, former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr.’s appointees to the job--Sim Van Der Ryn and Barry Wasserman--kept a high profile, using the job as a podium for progressive energy ideas, capital-area master planning, even the design of experimental, energy-conserving state office buildings.

Since then, though, the state architect has been largely a behind-the-scenes bureaucrat. But a new Assembly bill designed to streamline the state’s processing of plans for new hospitals and schools gives the state architect a more prominent role and may lead to other reforms that could make the office more visible.

To fill the $88,000-a-year post, Gov. Pete Wilson selected San Diego architect Harry Hallenbeck, 57. Hallenbeck, who has a reputation as an efficient, level-headed administrator, is known more for his legislative and organizational work on behalf of the architectural profession than for his conservative building designs. Such experience may serve him well in the months of streamlining he sees ahead.

“I think (Assembly Bill 47) is going to be the stimulus for looking at various streamlining efforts,” Hallenbeck said. “Whether that’ll end in major reorganization, I can’t predict. But the bill has caused us to look in those directions.”

The first San Diegan ever appointed to the post, Hallenbeck is on leave from the San Diego architectural firm Hallenbeck, Chamorro & Associates, in which he is a partner.

Soon after he started his new job in Sacramento on July 1, he began finding problems within the office.

Hallenbeck said, “The complaints were twofold: The time it takes to do plan checking, and the time it takes, and the budget impacts, of our design services (rendered to other state departments).

“It takes a long time to build a state building in the state process.”

Hospital and school plan-checking amounts to a massive workload. Between January and July of last year, the state architect’s office processed plans for 1,923 schools and 102 hospitals.

According to the California Council of American Institute of Architects, it takes five years to build a school in California under the present funding and plan-approval process. Plan approval alone can take more than a year in some cases.

“At the heart of the problem is that the state architect’s office is buried within the Department of General Services,” said Judy Sektnan, a lobbyist for the California Council of the AIA. “This is an agency that is responsible for the state auto fleet, printing, police--a lot of low-level control functions.

“Buried deep within these low-level functions is something as critical as the state’s design and construction department. I don’t think two different mandates--as a control agency counting beans and as a state architect regulating private industry in a cost-efficient manner--co-exist very well.”

An earlier draft of AB 47 proposed the creation of a new Department of Architecture, Development and Construction, including the state architect. But the Wilson Administration, perhaps not wanting to take on such a major reorganization this early in its tenure, asked that this portion of the bill be deleted.

Instead, the state architect’s office will gain sole responsibility for school plan-checking, while hospital plan-checking will be concentrated in the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD). Schools represent a significant workload--80% of the $2.1-billion worth of construction projects plan-checked by the state architect’s office last year.

Assemblywoman Delaine Eastin (D-Fremont), who introduced AB 47 to the Legislature late in 1990, believes it will substantially smooth the state plan-checking process.

“We had a chart developed for school and hospital plan-checking, and it looked like the wiring diagram for my stereo receiver, honest to God,” Eastin said.

“There are 33 different agencies in five different departments overseeing some aspect of design and construction. They called for different grades of carpeting, different standards for fire doors and plumbing, different standards for handicapped access.”

Gov. George Deukmejian vetoed an earlier version of the bill in 1990, leaving the whole plan-checking mess to Wilson, who signed AB 47 into law Oct. 11.

With the new, streamlined hospital and school plan-checking system, AB 47’s backers believe that $15 million can be saved each year in the construction of health facilities, and $22 million for school facilities, just by shortening the plan-checking process to beat inflation.

Plan-checking, which is concentrated in the Structural Safety Division of the state architect’s office, is only one of the office’s many responsibilities--but it is probably the single most time-consuming. About 150 to 200 employees are dedicated to the task.

The state architect’s office is organized into four departments:

--Design, which designs some smaller state buildings and manages the design of larger buildings by outside architects. This department also handles remodels of existing state buildings.

--Structural Safety, responsible for building code review and plan-checking of schools and hospitals.

--Special Programs, which analyzes the state’s inventory of about 18,000 buildings, ranging from offices to prisons, for such things as seismic safety and hazardous materials.

--Construction Services, which inspects and monitors state buildings during the construction process, and serves as a contractor for smaller remodel, repair and maintenance jobs on state buildings.

Hallenbeck said he spends a little over half his time in the Office of the State Architect’s main offices in Sacramento, where 200 employees are based. The rest of the time, he visits branch offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego.

Comparing his office with private-sector models of business management, Hallenbeck has spotted shortcomings. He is moving ahead with plans to smooth operations in many areas.

A state auditor’s report issued last year, showed that the state architect’s office charged $864,000 to “overhead” staff time--time that private sector businesses refer to as “non-billable.” The auditor’s report said this amounted to 13.6% of total staff time--an overhead substantially higher than the state’s goal of 5%.

But when Hallenbeck looked into these numbers, he found that the state uses an archaic method of tracking staff time spent on various projects. Where private sector businesses bill time according to different hourly rates for various employees, the state architect’s office doesn’t have a concise means of accounting for time that top-level managers, including Hallenbeck, put in on various projects.

“If we count the time a supervisor spends on a project as billable, this will reduce our overhead,” Hallenbeck explained.

“And there are other things,” he said. “Historic preservation, seismic safety, handicapped access. I think the state should set a leadership tone with its own new buildings, which can serve as demonstrators to the municipal and private sectors. But that doesn’t mean our buildings will be experimental.”

Hallenbeck is less concerned with being a style guru than with addressing substantial practical issues.

He is supervising the restoration of the quake-damaged state Supreme Court building in San Francisco, for example, using a new seismic construction method called “base isolation” to cushion the building against any future shakers.

And Hallenbeck hopes to oversee a reworking of statewide historic preservation codes so they are more specific about which buildings in California might be worth saving.

The Office of the State Architect dates back to 1850, and throughout the years and through various incarnations, the job has been largely that of a behind-the-scenes bureaucrat.

But under Edmund G. Brown Jr.’s gubernatorial reign, from 1974 to 1982, the office took a higher profile.

As his first state architect, Brown appointed San Francisco architect Sim Van Der Ryn.

“I met Sim through the San Francisco Zen Center,” recalled Brown, a candidate in the 1992 presidential race. “I was very interested in energy conservation. I wanted the state to be a model. I was also very interested in the capital master plan (for the heart of downtown Sacramento).”

Among architects, Van Der Ryn has always been considered something of a renegade. Because he never joined the American Institute of Architects, Brown had to get state law changed to allow a non-AIA state architect.

The most visible legacy of the Brown/Van Der Ryn years is two buildings in Sacramento: the Bateson Building and the Energy Commission Building, both experimental, energy-conserving designs.

Van Der Ryn also prides himself on stricter state energy codes adopted by the state during the Brown administration. He says these codes produce buildings in California that consume half the energy that older structures do.

Van Der Ryn’s successor under Brown, Barry Wasserman, continued to carry out a progressive agenda. But under three subsequent state architects appointed by Gov. Deukmejian (Whitson Cox, 1983 to 1986; Michael J. Bocchicchio, 1986 to 1989; and Paul Neel, Hallenbeck’s predecessor), the office changed.

“I think the office was being dismantled little by little,” said Neel, now dean of the architecture school at California Polytechnic University, Pomona. “First the prisons were moved out--we used to design them. Then some of the consultant services were moved away to the Office of Project Management and Development.”

With his broad experience and solid reputation, Hallenbeck seemed a good choice to succeed Neel.

After earning a master’s in architecture from UC Berkeley in 1956, Hallenbeck, who grew up in the upscale Bay Area community of Piedmont, went to work as a designer and estimator for a Bay Area steel company.

He then worked for several Bay Area architecture companies, including one in which he was a partner, before moving to San Diego, where he has been a partner at Hallenbeck, Chamorro & Associates for 15 years.

Hallenbeck has held several positions with local, state and national branches of the American Institute of Architects.

As president of the CCAIA in 1980, he spearheaded the move of the statewide chapter’s headquarters from San Francisco to Sacramento, to get closer to the state’s legislative power base.

His peers say Hallenbeck is both a capable manager and a competent designer. Among recent or current projects he has worked on are the restoration and expansion of the 800,000-square-foot federal courts building in downtown San Diego; two Navy housing projects worth $37 million at Camp Pendleton in Oceanside; master plans for redeveloping two shipyards on San Francisco Bay with new retail and commercial uses, and several corporate office buildings.

“Harry is kind of a straight shooter,” said San Diego architect David Thompson, last year’s local AIA chapter president. “I think he’s relatively insightful in processes and knows how to get to the essence of what causes problems.”

Added Ron Altoon, current president of the Los Angeles AIA chapter: “I’ve known Harry for seven years, and I have absolute respect for him and complete trust in his abilities. He’s a consummate professional, completely committed to the effective and efficient operation of the state architect’s office.”

Will Hallenbeck assume sufficient power to make a difference? If so, will he apply it effectively?

“My feeling is, if you focus on the plan-check regulation side, but also on project design and management, the office has a wealth of individual talent, and there is clearly support to improve what we’re doing,” Hallenbeck said. “But the attitude of ‘That’s the way we’ve always done it’ tends to persist. By bringing in a private-sector business mentality, and customer-client emphasis, I believe there are ways to improve what we do, the product we deliver, and I’m confident changes can be made.”