By Phillip G. Bernstein
The current interest in improving building industry outcomes and enhancing collaboration among architectural, engineering, and construction players comes along at exactly the right time for green design to catch the wave.
“Twenty-five years ago, working drawings and specifications of important structures were turned out without reference to other than a few documents dealing with materials and the technique of fabrication and assembly. During the intervening period no less than a revolutionary change has taken place. The production of a competent set of drawings, today, necessitates reference to a vast amount of widely scattered information covering an endless list of materials and items of one sort and another — all of which involves highly specialized methods of production and assembly. Failure to produce drawings in conformity with current practice imposes a serious burden of additional cost without compensating gains. This modern sort of factual matter is too complex and extensive to be memorized. It is scattered through an endless number of … documents of all sorts. Important facts are so deeply buried in the body of technical literature that they only come to light in the course of research. It follows that the architect … is faced with the necessity of spending an ever-increasing amount of time in the gathering of information. The pressure of time often forces the making of assumptions and trusting to luck.”
I often begin my lectures on future trends in the building industry by reading this passage to my audience. It seems to capture with clarity the conundrum faced by today’s building professionals. Exponentially increasing amounts of information must be integrated into more complex building designs experiencing shrinking schedules and budgets.
Overlaid on the better understood challenges of basic project execution, we now add the further consideration of sustainable design: How does the building affect the environment, and how are those effects mitigated? Seen in isolation, green design appears to be yet another “unfunded mandate” in the design process, clearly something that responsible designers must accommodate even if unsupported by any elaboration in the process of design itself. This essay argues that, to the contrary, sustainable design is a trend that is deeply consistent with the principles of integrated project delivery in general and building information modeling in particular and that the cause of sustainability will be well served by the industry’s move to both.
Not that we haven’t see a version of this movie before. As gas prices rise above $4 a gallon, some of us remember when conservation was equally prominent in the nation’s consciousness during the energy crisis of 1970s. At that time I was studying with architectural historian Vincent Scully, who I asked about the significance of the emerging solar architecture movement. Does the attempt to optimize a building’s relationship to the sun and minimize its use of energy rise to the level of architecture or even important design? Is it a style? His answer, curtly: “It’s plumbing, nothing more.” I suspect if I were to ask Scully that same question about the green design movement today, his answer would be somewhat different as architects and their clients struggle with the enormous effect buildings have on the planet.
One could contemplate two possible fates for sustainable design as an idea: disappearing once the current sense of crisis about climate change and energy abates or permanently incorporated into core building codes and equally important as life safety demands — and thus universally accepted as a basic constraint of responsible design. If the cardigan-clad President Carter of my college years had been able to convince the country to wage what he called “the moral equivalent of war,” the latter fate would have long-since occurred. But perhaps we’ve reached a different historical moment when sustainability is more than another set of constraints created in response to the specifics of environmentally responsible design. Maybe it’s part of a dramatic shift in perspective by the building industry that foretells a change in both the rules and the fundamental processes we use to build buildings.
The current interest in improving building industry outcomes and enhancing collaboration among architectural, engineering, and construction players comes along at exactly the right time for green design to catch the wave. Integrated project delivery has emerged as a method for breaking what Yale professor Peggy Deamer has called the “lingering dysfunction of the building industry ” enabled by the collaboration opportunities of building information modeling technology. While integrated project delivery is theoretically possible without BIM, it is unlikely that the former would have its current momentum without the latter. BIM provides the primary collaboration platform on which the project team can integrate, test, validate, and visualize their emerging design ideas with transparency.
That platform in its most basic form best supports a green design process. Optimizing a building for sustainability, like any other design objective, is an exercise in systematically exploring and tuning alternatives and making the best green decisions. That process is based on the designer’s judgment supported by extensive analysis of the implications of each decision. Architects have always relied on either simplistic rules of thumb or outsourced consultants to perform this analysis. And deriving truly insightful design information from which green analysis can be performed from paper-based documents (or their electronic graphic equivalents) is difficult at best and rarely done extensively.
Consider an architect attempting to optimize the energy consumption of a proposed design. During my (post Jimmy Carter) career, this process was entirely paper-based. In order to understand the energy implications of my project’s fenestration, site orientation, wall construction, or air distribution strategy, I would print the drawings and send them to my MEP engineer. She would measure them carefully by hand, make some assumptions about my intent, plug some numbers into a spreadsheet or other numerical analysis tool, and finally send me back the results — weeks later and inevitably over the energy budget. No surprise there. This crude, slow process would be repeated until I ran out of fee or time. And of course, while she was running numbers, I was continuing to work on the design itself, meaning the analysis was never based on the current scheme. Alas, the making of assumptions and trusting to luck.
A modern, BIM-based process is much more streamlined. Energy analysis software runs in parallel with BIM authoring tools, giving today’s architect push-button energy analysis that can be performed in just a few minutes either on the desktop or over the Internet. At minimum this approach allows many more iterations to reach green design objectives. Ideally, it empowers a designer to manage many more simultaneous variables than a paper-based design could support. And as BIM and analysis software gets further green functionality, the opportunity to rapidly iterate and optimize all green characteristics of a building becomes possible.
I imagine a time when those same analytical results are used to support automated validation of the design against LEED or other standards. These opportunities are but the most straightforward implications for green design using modern digital technology. There are more exotic possibilities.
Experimentation with integrated project delivery’s implications — new project organization schemes, risk sharing plans, business models, compensation schemes — opens up parallel possibilities for other innovations. Collaboratively created digital models become the basis for digitally fabricated building components. Data extracted from models guide more precise bills of materials and supports efficient construction supply chain management. Construction-phase “4-D” models allow contractors to optimize construction sequences, saving time, money, and energy. Behaviorally correct BIM databases are the foundation for sophisticated building management and control systems as well as facilities and operations management. Each of these results has an explicit sustainable objective that can be defined as a goal of the design before it begins and managed with care throughout the project’s lifetime.
In fact, the most important implication of both integrated project delivery and BIM for sustainability is this dramatic change in viewpoint for those responsible for the design-construct-operate process. The most unfortunate result of today’s non-integrated, silo-based processes is the lack of a comprehensive responsibility to take a life cycle view of a project from inception through operation to demolition. Under traditional low-bidder construction models, the contractor isn’t involved in the project until after completion of the drawings that will be used to build the project. The architect’s attention span begins to fade during construction with the remaining fee. Neither takes the broad view necessary to optimize a green result that comprises thousands decisions about design approach, materials, construction strategy, and eventual building operational procedures. Thus, integrated project delivery, particularly supported by BIM, is a fundamentally sustainable approach. As integrated project delivery becomes more commonly understood and deployed, sustainable design will benefit enormously. The two ideas are not just consistent but deeply compatible.
And finally, lest we think that 21st-century architects are unique in facing the challenges presented by the modern construction environment, take heart. That introductory quote comes not from some recent blog by a frustrated architect but from the introduction to the third edition of Architectural Graphic Standards published in 1948. As the saying goes, those who fail to understand history are doomed to repeat it. Perhaps the combination of circumstances into which tomorrow’s buildings will be designed — with integrated processes and relationships to their environments — means we’ll be making fewer assumptions and trusting less upon luck.
Phillip G. Bernstein is vice president for industry strategy and relations in the AEC Solutions Division of Autodesk. In addition, he teaches professional practice at the Yale School of Architecture. Bernstein is a member of the Design Futures Council Executive Board and is a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council.
