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This message has been cross posted to the following Discussion Forums: Project Delivery and Technical Design for Building Performance Knowledge Community . ------------------------------------------- As calls grow louder and clearer for closer and earlier collaborations between design professionals on building design projects, the methods of accomplishing this will affect all stakeholders. Greater early interaction between clients, architects, engineers, landscape architects, LEED experts, and code experts in clarifying and validating programs, testing concepts for energy use/carbon footprint and first cost, and arriving at validated final concepts will increase the scope and design schedule emphasis in predesign/programming, schematics, and design development phases. While some overall scope growth may occur resulting from this change, the other side is that more thorough design during early stages should help streamline efforts during the construction documents phases and eliminate common rework risks that can result from limited study and confirmation early on. In past years, early coordination has focused on preventing change orders, fine tuning scope and code compliance, and developing budgets. As energy, water, and cost controls take center stage the need to design the building form, fenestration, blocking and stacking, and site orientation with both engineering validations through quick modeling of energy/ water impacts and early cost studies is now becoming critical. In recent years schedule and scope pressures have resulted in expedited early design, compressed programming, and the near elimination of the entire design development phase on many projects. The 2030 Commitment and other green initiatives require levels of efficiency and effectiveness in design that have not been achieved on most projects. Driving down the impacts of energy and resource usage will require more careful programming to eliminate wasted floor area and wasted building volume, greater emphasis on finding the most effective ratio of building envelope to program area, and increased attention to optimizing fenestration to arrive at both the best overall building envelope U-Values and the most effective daylighting solutions. Current norms such as confirming the energy model results at around 95% construction documents or later are far off the reservation with regard to providing the critical early energy use feedback that design professionals and clients need to validate their ideas at the conceptual level. Confirming designs more completely earlier in the process will allow design professionals to focus on achieving more thorough construction documents and greater levels of integrated systems coordination since the burden of correcting for deficiencies stemming from less thorough early designs should be driven to record lows. -------------------------------------------
Drake A. Wauters, AIA
TDBP Advisory Group
Senior Technical Architect
Arlington, Virginia
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