Page 106 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

FEWER HIGHER-LEVEL CERTIFICATIONS 83

carrying a contingency of 5 percent, this cost increase is well within the contingency
budget. And, if an average elementary school costs $15 to $20 million (100,000 to
133,000 square feet in size), even “typical” LEED certification/paperwork costs of
$100,000 (counting commissioning and energy modeling) would only add 0.5 to
0.7 percent to the project budget.
I believe that social factors, much more than the perceived cost or difficulty of
LEED certification, are at work. Three come immediately to mind:

1 LEED projects achieve the best results when the design and construction teams use
an integrated design process. I believe and have observed in a variety of project
meetings that most architects don’t know how to manage such a process, are uncom-
fortable with it, or are unwilling to use it, and that most owners don’t push their
design and construction teams to change the traditional “serial hand-off” process.
2 Responsibility for LEED documentation is often not clearly assigned to a specific
“LEED Project Manager” except when there is a LEED consultant involved. Even
in that case, the consultant has little authority to demand documentation on a timely
basis from the design team. If the documentation management is kept in-house, it’s
often assigned to a relatively junior person, again with little authority to command
performance from other members of the building team. The solution here is to get
some good LEED project management software in place, beyond the USGBC’s
project data templates, something that I present later in this book, and then require
teams to achieve a certain specified results by using it.
3 Lack of integrated design training for all design and construction team members.
Mechanical engineers, in particular, should step up and demand that they receive
the same training as the other members of the project team.

If the problem is really about process, then building teams must become process
champions and should look to other industries where process is deemed highly impor-
tant, such as the Toyota production system in auto manufacturing. Laura Lesniewski,
is a principal at BNIM Architects in Kansas City, Missouri and led the design team for
the LEED Platinum-certified Lewis & Clark State Office Building in Jefferson City,
Missouri. Concerning how to run a successful project, she says:*

I focus on two things: having the right process and the right people. In people, I would
emphasize that the most important entity to be on board with the goals of the project
is the ultimately owner of the facility. Then, ideally, the rest of the design team has to
be on board. If you can get consultant team members that are at the top of their game,
then that’s all the better. Including as many people as early as possible is also impor-
tant. If the delivery method is such that you can have the contractor at the table early,
bring them on board, because they can provide invaluable advice, as you’re moving
through the process, in terms of helping with constructability and input on cost and
schedule. For example, by tracking closely with the design team’s efforts, they can
tell you how design decisions are influencing cost and schedule in smaller batches of

*Interview with Laura Lesniewski, BNIM Architects, March 2008.