Wayne Hughes, AIA, has been a practicing architect for more than 30 years. As the founder and principal of Hughes Group Architects since 1977, he has been responsible for designing more than 30 fire, rescue and other emergency service facilities. Hughes' firm won first place for renovation in the Station Style Fire Station Design Awards for the City of Alexandria (Va.) Fire Station #54. Fire Chief recently spoke with Hughes about the Alexandria project and station design in general.

FC: Describe some of the design constraints you faced while building the Alexandria, Va., station.

Hughes: The chief one was the lack of site area. The station is in Alexandria's historic district, and they wanted to virtually double the square footage of the facility. The facility includes three separate operational components: the existing Station #54, which is an operating fire station; the headquarters for the fire department; as well as the citywide 911 system. So we determined that we could not keep going up. The existing foundation couldn't handle a vertical load and the only feasible way to expand the building in place was to expand it on each of the building's four facades: north, east, south and west. So that was the real challenge, it was the site constraint and trying to fit the desired programmed areas on the existing site with the architectural review board and everyone else scrutinizing the project very closely. Then there was the issue of the three different departments, each one with their own security; that became a real design constraint as well.

FC: You've worked on 30 fire stations. What's the planning process when building or renovating a fire station?

Hughes: We had a joint-use committee, we had representatives from fire administration, the fire chief's office, we had representatives of the fire station — the operational lieutenant — and we had representatives of the 911 system. And we ran through three different options for them, we developed three different designs that did different things, expanded the building in different ways, and then it took us quite a while, about 12 weeks in the design phase to finally come up with a scheme that seemed to satisfy all the different parties.

We do this in a charette process. It's a French word which means “an intensive design workshop.” And we literally met at the station and drew, right there in front of everybody, all of the alternatives as they were talking to us. That made for a very efficient way to communicate and a very efficient way for people to see their ideas appear on paper quickly, and so we did reduce some of the design time by doing that kind of process.

The end result of this kind of process is that there's a high degree of buy-in; a high degree of satisfaction on all the stakeholder's parts, because they feel as though they've played a meaningful role in the design.

FC: What's the biggest factor when a station is trying to decide whether to renovate their old station or build a new one?

Hughes: I would say the biggest factor is changing technologies and changing emergency response. There's a continually evolving nature of emergency response, the vehicles are getting bigger, they're getting heavier. So I think one of the key constraints in evaluating an old station … is its ability to respond to the new means and methods of firefighting, and that includes technology improvements as well. It's whether or not the building can physically handle these new vehicles, whether they can handle the loads and whether they can handle upgrades such as OSHA requirements. Fire stations these days require a lot more technology, a lot more infrastructure than old stations used to.

FC: What's the most helpful information that fire departments could give to architects?

Hughes: The most helpful information is information that comes from the firefighters themselves. One of the things that we do as an office is we actually sleep in the fire stations that we design. We haven't slept in all of them, but we've truly slept in the majority of stations that we've designed. And what we do is, we have our own raincoats, our gear, our helmets and everything and we make sure that we understand what it's like to jump on top of one of these big vehicles, respond to a fire, and then, most importantly, what it's like to come and return your equipment efficiently. We also want to know what it's like to wake up at 2 in the morning and slide down a fire pole.

FC: Are fire poles in or out now?

Hughes: Well, I don't think they'll ever go out, I think they're part of tradition. We just finished a fire station, the College Park (Md.) Volunteer Fire Department. It has two poles and we preserved the old pole from the 1928 original station. I just don't see them going by the wayside. In a two-level station it's a very efficient way to respond vertically, and you can't ignore that.