Page 192 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

168 GETTING STARTED—PREDESIGN CONSIDERATIONS

As someone once said, “ask a question, play the fool once; ask no question, stay the
fool forever.” Without asking the right questions at the right time, building teams take
the risk of foreclosing good opportunities without even realizing it. The design and
construction process has a pronounced bias against “revisiting” prior decisions; it
always wants to move forward, unless forced to make significant system changes by
value engineering requirements. Therefore, it’s best to take a little more time at the
outset of the project to ask good questions and to demand good answers. (Figure 3.2
shows how degrees of design freedom diminish throughout the process, and it’s well
known that the cost of making changes increases dramatically as the process of design
and construction moves along. Most designers have seen this chart, but few truly
appreciate the implications, in the rush to “pick up a pencil and start sketching.”)
As the American inventor and design science guru Buckminster Fuller often wrote, a
problem correctly stated is solved 100 percent of the time theoretically and 50 percent
of the time in practice. By asking the right questions at the right time, you’ll solve at
least 50 percent of your design problem to implement appropriate solutions. I hope
that this list of questions will lead design team members to better problem statements
and then to improved sustainable design solutions.

Higher-Level Considerations:

The Triple Bottom Line

Most of the LEED Platinum projects I looked at for this book had several similar charac-
teristics. Many were institutional, they all had committed owners and they all hired very
experienced design and construction teams, although for almost every team it was their
first LEED Platinum project. John Pfeifer of McGough Construction in Minnesota talks
about the importance of the owners’ commitment and of early planning in their LEED
Platinum project (Fig. 9.1), a headquarters for Great River Energy in Minneapolis.*

When you have a high-level LEED and high-performance building goal, [the impor-
tance of] all [early] decisions is incredibly intensified. You want to push decisions
as early as possible because the potential downfall of mis-coordination and mis-
communication is that the repercussions can be much greater, i.e., you might not get
LEED Platinum or you might fail to receive the credits that you had planned on. Once
you get past a certain point and you’re committed to a certain building system, which
maybe doesn’t meet the requirement of your LEED credit scorecard, it may be too
late to modify things. The difference is you need to expedite the decision-making
process. You need to intensify the planning up front.
The piece that made all the difference in the work on the Great River Energy project was
the fact that we truly had an owner that was committed and focused on obtaining these
results. There are owners out there that talk about LEED and sustainability but as soon
as the decisions get a little bit more challenging with respect to costs and energies that

*Interview with John Pfeifer, McGough, April 2008.