When a 7.0 magnitude earthquake jolted Haiti in January, Shigeru Ban’s knee-jerk reaction was to get on a plane and go help. A veteran relief worker, the Japanese architect has built shelters at disaster sites around the globe. Web site.
Not much rankles like large-scale urban development. Take, for instance, some of the more extreme claims regarding the plan for a sports arena at Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards: ill-conceived, a waste of taxpayer money, a circumvention of the democratic process. But would anyone go so far as to indict it, or any other development, as a cause of death? Photos courtesy Oren Safdie (Above) A scene from The Bilbao Effect, a new play by Oren Safdie (top) that will be shown this Wednesday at the Center for Architecture. That’s the central accusation in Los Angeles writer Oren Safdie’s play, The Bilbao
Replicable test case in Colorado nears completion on time and within its $64-million budget The progressive aspect of the job—and a big departure for DOE—is that it was divided into three parallel design packages: site, shell and interiors. Similar to fast-tracking, the approach allowed the project to be done a couple of years faster than a design-bid-build approach. But because DOE is not set up for fast-tracking, the DB team still had to respond to contract milestones at the end of schematic design, design development and construction documentation. However, the milestones did not coordinate with the way the team was
Building teams can collaborate without complex multiparty contracts, say IPD skeptics More than five years into a collaborative building-production movement called integrated project delivery, warnings abound: Don’t try this with strangers. New risks replace old ones. Beware of waivers of claims. Get ready to open your books. Expect lengthy contract negotiations. Prepare to share any profits. Understand that multiparty contracts have not been tested in court. The advice is not just from lawyers and skeptics. Even IPD zealots admit IPD may change the designers’ standard of care. They acknowledge there are no insurance products covering multiparty contracts. They caution that
Building teams can collaborate without complex multiparty contracts, say IPD skeptics Other highly desirable elements of IPD are mutual respect and trust among participants, collaborative innovation, intensified early planning, open communication within the team, use of building information modeling (BIM) by multiple parties, collocation of teams, transparent financials and use of lean principles of design, construction and operations. The report is available as a free download at www.aia.org/ipdcasestudies. Five different “flavors” of the model contracts also present a problem. Lawyer Will Lichtig, a shareholder with McDonough, Holland & Allen, Sacramento, wrote the first one, in 2005, as general counsel for
Building teams can collaborate without complex multiparty contracts, say IPD skeptics Under most multiparty contracts, the architect and contractor are paid on the basis of cost, plus some or all of their overhead and an agreed-upon profit, a percentage of which is at risk. The owner funds a contingency. If it is preserved, savings are shared with the team. If there is a cost overrun and the contingency is exhausted, team members fund it out of their collective profits up to limits set in the agreement. “We are asking the parties to strip profit out of their costs and tell
Replicable test case in Colorado nears completion on time and within its $64-million budget While some are testing the waters of integrated project delivery, a group within the U.S. Dept. of Energy is tilling greener pastures by devising a new design-build project-delivery model for fast-tracked, net-zero-energy buildings, public and private. DOE calls the process progressive, performance-based design-build (DB). Haselden Construction, DOE’s DB contractor for the first application of the model—the $64-million Research Support Facility of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo.—calls it design-build “on steroids.” The 222,000-sq-ft RSF is the largest known net-zero-energy building in North America,
A last-minute rescue effort has saved from destruction the company archives of famed mid-century modernist Minoru Yamasaki. The records, which include work related to the Yamasaki-designed World Trade Center towers in New York and numerous other projects, are now preserved in the State of Michigan Archives in the state capital in Lansing. Photo courtesy State of Michigan Archives World Trade Center rendering Click on the slide show icon to see additional photos. Related Links: A Once Eminent Firm Meets a Bitter End Born in Seattle, Yamasaki (1912-1986) moved to Detroit in 1945 to work for the firm of Smith, Hinchman
The Action Plan for National Recovery and Development recognizes short-, medium- and long-term needs and proposes to set up a Temporary Committee for Rebuilding Haiti, which will eventually become the Agency for the Development of Haiti. It also sets up a Multiple Donor Fiduciary Fund, which will allow for a “coordinated and coherent approach” to the formulation of programs and projects as well as their financing and execution. The most immediate need, however, is to provide safe shelter for people now homeless. Intense seasonal rains are expected in early May, and the hurricane season begins on June 1. Both pose
RSS