When you buy a car, you have a huge variety of vehicles to select from. One of the first ways to narrow down the choice is to decide what you can afford. £7000 for a basic city runabout? No problem. A bit more to spend and you can have air conditioning, and a cd player as standard, with leather interior a few grand extra. And if you're doing really well, maybe you're looking for something super-fast, handmade, hand-stitched and expensive enough to leave your bank manager gasping for breath.
You'll hate me for saying it, but buildings should be the same. Yes, each building is unique and handmade and therefore automatically in the very expensive league. But why are clients given the impression that they can pay Citroen prices yet still get an Aston Martin at the end of the day?

Changes are the key to the problem. Clients always want to make changes, and it seems that engineers, and many others in construction, let them get away with it.

If you changed your mind halfway through the stitching of leather seats in your Rolls Royce and wanted a different colour, frankly you would expect to pay through the nose for the privilege, and not to whine about it afterwards.

What's different about changing where you put the boardroom or the restaurant in a new building after the engineers have created detailed designs? You want change, you can have it – at a price.

And yet, the construction industry is expected to accommodate change while sucking up the extra costs that it creates. Egan has referred to the construction industry as wasteful. True there are areas where time and money could be applied more effectively.

But the fact that a building starts out with one price tag, and ends up costing more? Not waste, simply the cost of flexibility. Other industries are not vilified for making customers pay extra for this kind of approach.

Egan's Accelerating Change calls on clients to take the lead in creating a more efficient and integrated approach to construction. It makes sense that they should and some of the leading edge clients are already going this way.

But everyone needs to decide what kind of product the industry is really making – handmade, flexibly designed expensive one-offs; or less costly, more standard buildings where clients get what they asked for right at the outset.

Source

Building Sustainable Design

Postscript

Karen Fletcher, Editor