Page 89 - Green Building Through Integrated Design

66 THE PRACTICE OF INTEGRATED DESIGN

A New Trend—The Integrated Office?

It appears that some architects have decided that the best way to deliver integrated design
is to have an integrated design team within the same office. While there are a large num-
ber of “A/E” (architect/engineer) and “E/A” (engineer/architect) offices among larger
companies,* there appears to be a trend among a few firms to bring the key building
designers all under one roof: architects and interior designers, structural and mechanical
engineers, and landscape architects. California’s LPA, Inc. is a midsized green architec-
ture firm that adopted this approach. President Dan Heinfeld says: †

My firm looks at the world pretty differently because while other people talk about inte-
grated design, we actually changed the way our office practices. We have architects, engi-
neers, landscape architects, and structural disciplines all in house so that the office is more
integrated with people outside the traditional “design” disciplines. I believe it’s profoundly
different when those disciplines are in house. You really can look at integrated design
when all of those disciplines are in balance trying to find the right sustainable solution.
On our projects there is someone represented from each of the disciplines at our sus-
tainable charrettes, which basically happen at the beginning of a project. It’s not addi-
tive or subtractive, it becomes part of the building design’s DNA.
Internally, it’s easy to get people involved in the [integrated design] process because
we’ve been talking about this for a long time. It’s being driven by two things: One,
we know that this integrated approach will lead to better buildings and architecture
and the second is that market forces want buildings delivered in different ways,
whether that be design/build, integrated project management, or using Building
Information Modeling (BIM). The market place is leading the discussions, “We want
projects delivered differently. We want the design world to work differently.”
It is profoundly different when architects and engineers are sitting next to each other and
having those spur-of-the-moment discussions involving not only design issues but also
structural and mechanical issues. For example, an engineer, an architect and a landscape
architect get together to talk about a project and look for that right sustainable solution
as opposed to sending each other a drawing, setting up a meeting, etc. It becomes a much,
much more integrated process which we know will lead to a more sustainable solution.

Whether this trend will become more widespread is open to question, but it is one
increasingly common response to the shortage of consulting engineers willing to engage
architects early in the building design process, so that the building team can produce a
better integrated and higher-performance result. Portland, Oregon architect James Meyer
is not convinced. He says, “I could argue all day that diverse trends brought together in
a multidisciplinary team with members selected specifically for each project will result
in a better project than one where the members happen to work for the same firm. The
“best” do not likely live at the same firm when it comes to [forming] a full team.” ‡

*For example, A/E or E/A firms represented 19 of the top 50 (38 percent) “pure” designers in the annual
survey of the top 500 design firms conducted by Engineering News-Record, April 21, 2008, p. 46.
† Interview with Dan Heinfeld, LPA, Inc., February 2008.
‡ James Meyer, Opsis Architecture, personal communication, May 2008.