The Checklist Manifesto_ How to Get Things Right - Atul Gawande [21]
Both aspects are tricky. In designing a building, experts must take into account a disconcertingly vast range of factors: the makeup of the local soil, the desired height of the individual structure, the strength of the materials available, and the geometry, to name just a few. Then, to turn the paper plans into reality, they presumably face equally byzantine difficulties making sure that all the different tradesmen and machinery do their job the right way, in the right sequence, while also maintaining the flexibility to adjust for unexpected difficulties and changes.
Yet builders clearly succeed. They safely put up millions of buildings all over the globe. And they do so despite the fact that construction work has grown infinitely more complex over the decades. Moreover, they do it with a frontline workforce that regards each particular job—from pile-driving to wiring intensive care units—much the way doctors, teachers, and other professionals regard their jobs: as specialized domains in which others should not interfere.
I paid a visit to Joe Salvia, the structural engineer for our new hospital wing. I told him I wanted to find out how work is done in his profession. It turned out I’d come to the right person. His firm, McNamara/Salvia, has provided the structural engineering for most of the major hospital buildings in Boston since the late 1960s, and for a considerable percentage of the hotels, office towers, and condominiums as well. It did the structural rebuilding of Fenway Park, the Boston Red Sox baseball team’s thirty-six-thousand-seat stadium, including the Green Monster, its iconic thirty-seven-foot, home-run-stealing left field wall. And the firm’s particular specialty has been designing and engineering large, complicated, often high-rise structures all over the country.
Salvia’s tallest skyscraper is an eighty-story tower going up in Miami. In Providence, Rhode Island, his firm built a shopping mall that required one of the largest steel mill orders placed on the East Coast (more than twenty-four thousand tons); it is also involved in perhaps the biggest commercial project in the world—the Meadowlands Xanadu entertainment and sports complex in East Rutherford, New Jersey, which will house a stadium for the New York Giants and New York Jets football teams, a three-thousand-seat music theater, the country’s largest movie multiplex, and the SnowPark, the nation’s first indoor ski resort. For most of the past several years, McNamara/Salvia’s engineers have worked on fifty to sixty projects annually, an average of one new building a week. And they have never had a building come even close to collapsing.
So I asked Salvia at his office in downtown Boston how he has ensured that the buildings he works on are designed and constructed right. Joe Salvia is sixty-one, with almost no hair, a strong Boston accent, and a cheery, take-your-time, how-about-some-coffee manner that I didn’t expect from an engineer. He told me about the first project he ever designed—a roof for a small shopping plaza.
He was just out of college, a twenty-three-year-old kid from East Cambridge, which is not exactly where the Harvard professors live. His father was a maintenance man and his mother worked in a meat processing plant, but he was good in school and became the first member of his family to go to college. He went to Tufts University planning to become a doctor. Then he hit organic chemistry class.
“They said, ‘Here, we want you to memorize these formulas,’ ” he explained. “I said, ‘Why do I have to memorize them if I know where the book is?’ They said, ‘You want to be a doctor? That’s what you have to do in medicine—you have to memorize everything.’ That seemed ridiculous to me. Plus I wasn’t