Quality Ain’t for Sale: Architects must have a plan B if they are to face value engineering practices

Once upon a time customers cared about the buildings they were making. They would care about the quality of its materials, if they lasted long beyond their lifetime and if they left a positive impact on its users. They would put an effort on having the best contractors they could afford, as the quality of the construction directly impacted one of the most important investments they would make in their lifetime. And they would, of course, hire an architect who could bring to life a design worth building.

But, in the last decades, the importance of finance overcame the importance of economics and buildings became assets rather than dwellings meant to last further than what fast profits would allow. Those with good musical taste will recall the infamous Get ‘Em Out By Friday by Genesis and its satiric depiction of genetic control scientists who would engineer people’s height in order to fit more tenants in the same building size. And that was back in the 1970s, when at least housing was meant for people to live in. Imagine what Gabriel would write today if he saw the empty penthouses on Manhattan’s new skyline superstars being traded on the stock market like cattle.

The truth is that the commodification of buildings is here to stay. It is not something exclusive to architecture of course, but since the 2008 real estate bubble in the US (caused mainly by cheap credit and a belief that the housing market could never go down) there seems to have been no real lesson taken from it. I’m not an anti-capitalist myself, although I am strongly convinced that governments should have a say on important economic policies taken in their countries. What does bother me is seeing financial advice overseeing decisions regarding the construction industry while the most experienced professionals in the sector are ignored. And that takes me, of course, to the role the architect must take responsibility for in this spreadsheet-ruled world.

Architects are the best equipped professionals to deal with this problem. But they are often caught off guard and fall prey of profit-seeking organisations who have no interest in the quality of what they are asking for rather than tight deadlines and contained creativity. If anything architects can do is to adapt and get ahead in order not to be caught on the curve by those who want to micromanage our services.

That takes me to the concept of “Value Engineering”. Building professionals working nowadays on moderately large architecture studio will have heard the term. Some might have even experienced it first-hand.

It means exactly what it sounds like: value engineering. It is a way of bringing down costs using awkwardly sophisticated methods that don’t take in consideration the holistic implications of bringing a building to life. Instead of acknowledging the intricate complexities of architecture, value engineering cuts costs without looking past the bill. That usually results in buildings with poorer finishes, with higher maintenance costs and shorter living cycles that serve no one but those who exploit them.

A different strategy is needed, then, if architects are to be kept in control of the buildings they design. We must update ourselves and stay one-step ahead. Reducing costs is fine if those are the rules of the game, but architects should have one or two tricks on their sleeves to counteract. Avoiding the value engineering process altogether might not be possible, but being the one to do so might be a much more feasible solution.

So, when it comes to lowering expenses, architects should step up and have a Plan B on the shelf once their initial proposal get’s rejected by the client. An agreement should be made that takes in consideration both the quality of the construction, utility and aestethical coherence of the built result as well as the client’s budget and deadlines expectations.

One way to do so would be to have a preset of tried and tested alternatives of materials, construction techniques, details, suppliers and design procedures that are known to work well together. Such alternatives can help lower costs while preserving the overall cohesion of the construction. Much of that comes, of course, with some technology and automation.

Value engineering’s business core is efficiency. It is a process that searches alternative solutions for situations that are expected to take too much time or too much money. And who are architects but problem-solvers? And who knows their buildings the best? You guessed it.

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel when others have already invented the car. Pre-drawn construction details, then, should be found on every studio’s servers ready to be adapted to the given circumstance. Parametrized solutions know to act in an expected way could be combined without the worry that they might fail. For example, a library of wall-ceiling, wall-floors, ceiling-slabs, and floor-slab construction details could be available to quickly update shop-drawings. Different materials could be loaded into them and linked to a database with their updated market prices. A list of suppliers and products with different costs should be readily available to inform both the architect and the client about the financial costs of one option or another. In this way, alternatives can be explored before they are needed.

A library of parametric floor plan layouts, on the other hand, consisting of different bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms, and other more sophisticated building functions such as classrooms, corridors, emergency staircases, and exits, industrial kitchens, and locker rooms, can be used to avoid starting from scratch with entire buildings, thus speeding up the early and later stages of the design.

BIM models should have LODs as high as possible but be kept light to allow budget iteration on the fly without too much back and forth of 2D drawings and unnecessary emails. A well designed (but flexible) template can act as a toolkit of high-quality 3D models filled with information about manufacturers used often, with peer-views descriptions synced across the studio’s servers. Some of them could even be linked to the brand’s on-line catalogs.

Algorithmic design or platform specific APIs could propagate details throughout the model and export quantity bills weekly to keep the client updated. A common data environment, or a CDE, should be used at all stages of the project to keep updates in check and manage miscommunication. Integrating all parties - from the engineering teams to the contractor - on a centralised platform will ensure that inefficiencies regarding the transfer of ideas are kept to a minimum.

‘Mood Boards’, an important metric of the “feel” of architecture, should be kept at a close hand so no one loses the overall sense of what the building will look like. Different mood boards with pre-set combinations allow for different iterations according to budgets.

Ultimately, embracing pre-fabricated construction opens the door for economics of scale and quality control that will ensure that buildings feel, look and “taste” exactly like architects imagined them. In this way, by staying one step ahead of costs, architects can accurately adjust their designs to rising demand without the negative implications that off-context techniques such as value engineering might bring along. The end user will thank us.