Building Better Buildings

Design, bid, and build: While this is the traditional way to construct a building, does it still work?

It’s an important question. Close to $700 billion, or about 8 percent, of the U.S. annual gross domestic product, is spent on construction. The building industry has become so large and projects have become so complex in recent years that building owners and users alike complain that no one is happy by the time a job is done. What’s needed, according to Joe Powell, the executive director of the Rice Building Institute, is a new type of management that fosters an integrated team approach.

“Creating the built environment in the United States involves 1.2 million companies,” Powell comments. “The industry is large, fragmented, and burdened by a wide collection of outmoded traditions, and none of the major players are happy.”

“Engineering, design, and construction processes have become more sophisticated, but the management of these processes hasn’t kept pace.” —Joe Powell

Most of the problems, according to Powell, start with the process itself. Traditional sequential product delivery systems—which often cost too much, take too much time, and become too confusing—need to be replaced with an integrated team approach that allows all the project’s experts to get involved earlier in the process.

Bringing together different building experts—from the architects, engineers, and contractors to the real estate advisors and attorneys—requires new management approaches, revised legal relationships among the various professional groups, and new insurance and bonding requirements, Powell notes. An integrated construction team also would need to overcome adversarial relationships that traditionally have existed among the different professional groups, making it difficult for the groups to share their expertise effectively. “New management structures need to be developed so the performance of one set of experts is not sacrificed for the motives of another,” Powell says. “We must find better methods for these teams to apportion risks and rewards.”

In recent focus group meetings at the university, the Rice Building Institute surveyed 102 building industry leaders representing every major discipline, including finance, design, engineering, construction, and management. According to Powell, the feedback from owners and users was that today’s rapidly evolving business climate poses serious challenges to those involved in new building construction. By the time a new building is programmed, designed, constructed, and occupied, its original purposes may have changed.

“When we interviewed the major owners of various construction projects,” Powell says, “they claimed the problem isn’t the competence of the professionals involved in a building project. They believe the problem is poor management and communication. Engineering, design, and construction processes have become more sophisticated, but the management of these processes hasn’t kept pace.”

One of the barriers to improved communication between the professions is their increasing specialization. Powell hopes that eventually the professional schools will incorporate the notion of interdisciplinary collaboration into their curricula.

Currently, Powell and members of the institute are overseeing the development of alternative project delivery strategies for new healthcare facilities. Working with a broad, interdisciplinary group of industry and academic leaders, they will define and analyze the advantages and disadvantages of current systems used to construct the 10 largest medical centers in the United States. Their goal is to recommend a new set of approaches and create a management decision matrix that will represent the most effective delivery systems for different types of healthcare buildings.

—Jennifer Evans