Quality and Merit

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Letterfrom Editor Tile

Upon notifying this year's Facilities of Merit® winners, one operator contacted us for some background on the program. He was putting together a press release and wanted to know what it was about his facility that caught the judges' attention. It's a deceptively complex question that brought me back to a recent re-reading of Robert Pirsig's classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a novel that aims and ultimately fails — in the most beautiful of ways — to understand what it is we're talking about when we talk about "quality."

A perusal through the AB archives that line the shelves in my office only deepens the mystery of what it is about those facilities that make the FoM cut. One might think the Showcase submissions from 1994 would pale in comparison to what's featured in 2018. But the craftsmanship and design of those projects was on par with what we see today. Sure, technology has improved and aesthetics have changed, but on the whole, the projects of two decades ago were not lacking in what we might flippantly call "quality."

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