Page 25 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

THE RECIPE FOR SUCCESS IN HIGH-PERFORMANCE PROJECTS 3

Beginning a project with three to five charrettes is obviously a major commitment
of time and money for a design team and for a project owner. Reed discusses how
these contracts and commitments can be managed effectively.

We do a Part A and a Part B contract. The Part A contract says that we’re going to pay
the design team members—landscape architects, civil engineers, mechanical engi-
neers, energy modelers, architects, water systems people—for three days of research,
for example. We spell out what they’re going to be doing. The contract also says that
we’ll pay them for a two-day charrette. We ask for a proposal for that work and then
we ask for a general, ballpark proposal so we can get idea of what they’re thinking of
for the rest of the work. But we only commit to Part A, that first research phase and
charrette. At the first charrette, we go through the goals of the project or at least the
general direction of the project. We road map it so that everybody is aligned around
what they need to do, why and how many meetings they’ve got to attend. Then they
can go back and write a detailed proposal. The client and the team members now
understand what they’re proposing and why.
This really gets everybody on the same page, it’s fair to everyone and I’ve never seen
anyone resist it once the road map was drawn. If you’re bringing together different
design team members that you’ve never worked with before and you don’t quite know
their capabilities, some pretty important discoveries are made. A few times we’ve had
people that say, “I didn’t know this is what I was signing up for. I didn’t know this is
what green design required. I didn’t know I had to do this level of energy modeling.”
You find out if in fact you have the right people around the table or are missing expert-
ise that may benefit the project’s objectives.

Stephen Kieran, of Philadelphia-based Kieran Timberlake Associates, discussed a con-
trasting approach to a proposed LEED Platinum Sculpture Building and Gallery at Yale
University. In this case, there was only a 21-month window to get the project designed
and built; there wasn’t much time for extensive studies and elaborative iterative design
exercises. The solution: pull together a team of very experienced sustainable design
experts and have them collaborate from day one, but without a formal team-building pro-
gram. It helped that the climate engineering consultants, Atelier Ten, had done many pre-
vious projects at Yale, so they were familiar with the university’s requirements as well as
local climatic factors.* Kieran described how the project came together so quickly. †

When the client came to us, they came with an extraordinary schedule for the project—
meaning it was really fast. In hindsight, that actually helped the whole process.
They came and asked whether or not we, as team, could deliver the building from
programming through occupancy in 21 months, which is less than half of the
normal time. That immediately required re-engineering and redesigning the
process because they weren’t structured to do that. They’re a big institution and

*Interview with Patrick Bellew, Atelier Ten, London, February 2008.
† Interview with Stephan Kieran, March 2008.