Page 28 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

6 THE RECIPE FOR SUCCESS IN HIGH-PERFORMANCE PROJECTS

Kieran’s description highlights that the pressure to perform does bring disparate
viewpoints together. The uniqueness of having the owner in the design meetings, with
full authority to make decisions on behalf of the university, is something that other
teams can learn from. High-performance design needs iterations, but it doesn’t need
and can’t really tolerate, waiting around for some higher-ups to review design deci-
sions (who haven’t been part of the process). The role of the architect in persuading
different design disciplines to work together is the hidden message in this tale. Beauty
comes out of a fully integrated design. There’s something inherently pleasing about a
human body, for example, that no robot can duplicate, because it’s the product of a
fully integrated design (intelligent or otherwise!).
The fast-paced project has many side benefits other than forcing an integrated
design process. After all, the team still had to have organizing and “process mapping”
meetings at the beginning, but it didn’t have time for everyone to go back to their
offices, get involved with a half-dozen other projects, and then somehow do some
analysis just in time for the next design meeting. Kieran said:
Slower isn’t necessarily better artistically or on a performance basis. In some ways
forcing people to make decisions—to just be decisive and move [along] almost cre-
ates better architecture than some of the hand-holding and angst that can go on when
you don’t have that type of a fast-moving process.

Another key lesson from this tale is that principals need to stay with the project. For
this process to work well, calendars have to be cleared and meetings must be attended
by all key players—no excuses! Too often in the design process, the principals dele-
gate meeting attendance to project managers, but still reserve the right to review design
decisions, so the entire process is never fully integrated. Although Kieran doesn’t explic-
itly say it, I’m sure the price of admission to this project for the consultants was the
commitment to attend the regular biweekly meetings. If you’ve ever attended project
meetings, you know that no principal of a design firm wants to come to a meeting
unprepared to make a contribution, so I will assume that the lead architects and engi-
neering consultants were constantly engaged in this project. It turns out that the
builders were engaged from the outset as well. Kieran said:

By the way, the builders, Shawmut Design & Construction, attended all of the bi-
weekly design sessions and provided cost information from the outset. They were a firm
that wasn’t necessarily noted for building high-performance buildings, but they got into
it and developed the whole process along with us. They were pricing it as we went.

Let’s look at the engineer’s perspective on integrated design and high-performance
buildings. Kevin Hydes is an engineer and also currently chairman of the World Green
Building Council. He has previously served as chairman of the U.S. Green Building
Council and is an honorary member of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada.
Kevin brings a strong cross-disciplinary view to the subject.*

*Interview with Kevin Hydes, Stantec Consulting, January 2008.