Page 257 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

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CONSTRUCTION AND OPERATIONS

This is a book about designing and delivering high-performance projects. Since most
of the money in a project’s life is spent in the construction and operations phases,
those phases merit entire books on their own. For an integrated design process, the
construction period is where “the rubber meets the road,” a time when all of your
grand intentions and careful design ideas have to be realized in the messy process of
getting a building from a set of drawings and a hole in the ground to a finished proj-
ect in which people can live, work, study, or play for decades to come.

Construction

I have found it useful on LEED projects to make sure that the construction process
starts with a full explanation of the LEED goals and specifically which LEED credits
the construction team is charged with achieving. If the construction documents were
prepared properly, all of these requirements should have been in the General
Conditions, Division 1 specifications. However, it’s not generally the case that every-
one reads all the specifications. That’s why actively managing the construction process
in high-performance projects is critical to achieving the desired results. The construc-
tion kickoff meeting is the place where all this starts, and a good general contractor will
use a portion of that meeting to bring the LEED goals to the attention of the entire team.
John Pfeifer is senior vice president at McGough Construction in Minneapolis. His
team recently completed (April 2008) an expected LEED Platinum project, a high-rise
headquarters building in Minneapolis for Great River Energy. From the general con-
tractor’s viewpoint, he makes four key points about conducting a successful LEED
Platinum project:*

1 Push the envelope on early decision making.
2 Intensify the early planning activity, before design even starts.

*Interview with John Pfeifer, March 2008.

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