Collaborating with Contractors for Innovative Architecture

With construction more complex than ever, architecture firms are joining forces with construction experts to solve tough problems and innovate. The key is to understand the benefits and challenges.
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C.C. Sullivan, Communications Consultant and Author

The Right Partners, the Right Process

Experts in construction offer two rules for architects interested in collaboration: choose your partners carefully, and tailor your service approach. One well-known international firm, for example, has sought deeper control of its pioneering designs by working closely with specialty contractors in structural steel and titanium cladding. The partnerships inform the firm's studio structure, information-technology choices, and to some extent, its client list.

"To successfully innovate, it's important to develop longer-term, better relationships with suppliers and subcontractors," Fraga observes. "Prequalification is essential to that."

A prequalification effort should encompass a review of three measures, he explains:

  • Capabilities
  • Past performance
  • Past experience

Performance can include quantitative measures such as successful completions as well as more qualitative traits, such as the company's track record of "customer orientation," Fraga explains. And past experience means types and size of projects as well as specific construction techniques.

Considering possible project outcomes is useful in these situations. "Choose your contractor partner thoughtfully," adds Parsons. "If they bring in a value engineer and the collaboration between the contractor and the architect is not good, that can damage project or at a minimum increase liability for the architect. And fast-track has a whole set of problems of its own."

"It's really a three-way equation: Who fits best with the client, the project type and location, and with the architect culturally, in terms of how the firm services clients and its people's skills, services and attitudes," says Mullen.

For a growing number of firms, working together can mean involvement by the architect in shop drawings and fabrication-a nontraditional role that many specialty contractors would rather not consider. To extend the architect's domain to the shop floor, some firms have adapted CAD/CAM technologies for architectural use. The software allows the firms to coordinate designs directly with key fabricators by interfacing with robotic cutting and milling tools.

This direct transfer of architectural CAD data not only increased the architect's control of the construction process, but it also reduced the chronic overlap in creating working drawings, says 3D/I's Thomsen. "I've heard estimates from A/E firms that between 30 percent and 60 percent of construction documents are discarded and replaced with shop drawings. That's as much as 2 percent of the construction cost of the project that we're throwing away," he explains. And it's more than a simple loss of money, he adds: "It's also a quality loss."

The idea of having more control and being more productive has propelled architects' use of building-information modeling, or BIM. And conversely, as Black points out, the availability of BIM software has actually boosted interest in collaborative project delivery. "When you have the contractor involved at the early phases, tools like BIM save time and create a more coordinated product," says Black.

Yet there are impediments to the widespread use of BIM even though "the benefits are huge," says Parsons. "The risk is, who controls the software and who is putting pieces of design into it. Will it allow a vendor, for example, to put the specifications in-and is the architect liable for that? Those questions are not answered yet." Other insurance and legal specialists agree with Parsons that BIM has the potential to go either way. "If it's not used appropriately," she cautions, "architects can come up with short end of the stick."

A recent article in the newsletter Construction Litigation Reporter contends that BIM is more than a technology-it's an entirely new delivery system. The author, attorney Howard W. Ashcraft Jr., notes that several emerging technologies including BIM are now accelerating the need for collaboration.

 

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Originally published in October 2006

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