Page 87 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

64 THE PRACTICE OF INTEGRATED DESIGN

We’re a design/build contractor on many projects, so we get very involved in the
design. The old notion was an architect drew it, the engineer designed the structure
and we would get a comprehensive package that asked for our price. That’s changed
completely in the green building arena. We have not done much of the “hard-bid”
type of work. [For us and for most of these green building projects,] it’s no longer
the traditional design-bid-build process. It’s a holistic design process where we’re
hired at the same time as the architect, in some cases even beforehand. We have a
great opportunity at that time to bring up green, we might say, “Have you consid-
ered making this a green project?” The owner or the architect often say, “We’ve
heard that costs more.” I typically reply, “We’ve done 45 LEED projects and they
all have been between one and two percent in first-cost premium. We don’t know
the design strategy yet but we can certainly help you down that path.” Then we
might hear, “That great, only one percent. That’s a rounding error on a $40 million
project.”
In these cases, we get to bring our arsenal of products and materials that we’ve suc-
cessfully used and suggest those items to the architects for inclusion in the specs. We
don’t take the liability of being the provider of the specifications for the projects. We
do what I like to call greenlining. We go in and greenline the current specs and say
things like, “These aren’t low-flow toilets. This isn’t a low-VOC product.” We
become the constructability reviewer.
We’re doing a LEED Platinum project for a very popular sports-type company. They
are really into organic and all things green. When we showed up at the table, it was
one of the first times [for us] that the architect, the engineer, the whole project team
was already at a very high level of green thinking. Yet, we had an existing building
and we were going to deconstruct parts of it. Architects aren’t generally used to tak-
ing things down and reusing the materials. We brought in a wood-certifier and had
them evaluate the building. They provided a list of opportunities (for reuse of the
materials) to the project team. The architect could then say, “We could use that
reclaimed lumber here, now that we know the quality and availability.” That’s an
example of where we might say, “We want to go after this credit. Let’s talk about
deconstructing this building and reusing it.”
Sometimes the design team doesn’t necessarily trust us—that we’re in it for the right
reasons and doing green for the right reasons. In our case, we’re an open-book con-
tractor. We share our numbers, our bid, our fee and our markup. We treat it like we
want to be part of the family. It’s the notion of being married to a client for a period
of time. We still want to have a great relationship with them “once the kids go to
school”—through the whole process.

From this perspective, you can see that a truly integrated design process will have
to include the contractor as well as the future operators and occupants of the project.
It’s not really a high-performance design unless it can be built for close to a conven-
tional budget and operated in a sustainable manner by the people who are actually
going to be responsible for it. So, to be successful, integrated design has to take the
long view of building construction and operations.