By: Brady Stone
It was great to spend the evening with a thoughtful group of owners, engineers, fabricators, architects and builders to talk about how we can improve the process by which our built environment is actually built. It reinforces in my mind the need to treat the building process like a design problem - to not take the accepted approach as a given, to think critically, work iteratively, collaborate wherever possible. There is so much that can be improved…..
- How do we exchange information and communicate across professions, through legal constraints, so that a more productive dialogue can be had between designers, fabricators and builders?
- How can alternate concepts of building – prefabrication, panelized construction, use of components or ‘chunking’ – be better adapted to a variety of building types? Particularly adaptive reuse??
- Design build is great, but what is often called design build is actually build-design. It prioritizes the building and effectively sidelines thoughtful design. That leaves a lot of great opportunities unrealized for our clients.
- How can the fabricated systems generally be made more flexible, more adaptable, like those made by DIRTT? (they hosted the event, but this is not a shameless plug –they are doing it)
Nearly a third of all construction dollars in the US goes towards mistakes, errors, and re-dos. It’s easy to tabulate the cost in dollars, but equally horrifying to me is the wasted human energy and implied environmental impact.
