Team talk

Several initiatives in the construction sector have highlighted the need for further integration of design activities across the disciplines of architecture and engineering. Undoubtedly, both professions are facing real challenges in terms of how they can work together more effectively.

The disparities between the two professions are often evident in the early stages of a project, and design discussions often reveal a number of home truths. Architects will emphasise spatial implications, for example, while services engineers will highlight performance issues. Architects are used to producing measured drawings, while services engineers tend to favour diagrams.

Generally, services engineers are more metrically disposed and have a greater understanding of graphical or chart representations. They are also more accustomed to numerical product data and mathematical calculations.

Architects are less accustomed to considering time series events (ie envisaging how the building will function over day and night) – while services engineers are used to considering and analysing these aspects of building performance.

Traditionally – although less so now as good practice in integrated design begins to take hold – the architect is deemed to provide the 'creativity and innovation' at the start of a project, with the services engineer 'merely responding' to this. This has created tensions between the two professions, with several noticeable outcomes.

Architects have tended to place more emphasis on communication, whereas services engineers have tended to work more in isolation. As a consequence, as one multi-disciplinary consultancy who tried drawing the two together at a very early stage in the design process found, the architects who were used to working in teams became impatient with the engineers, who were not so in tune with team working.

To services engineers, design is the whole process of creating the building. To architects, it is the initial creation of the form, what then follows is detailing.

Architects often use a team of staff who remain with the project throughout, as a fairly consistent effort is required. Services engineers co-ordinate a large number of specialist short-term inputs from staff who then leave to work on other projects. This poses problems when a design change is required and staff have to be recalled from other duties.

Peer group assessment is important to both professions, although quality architecture is more difficult to define than quality m&e engineering. Both parties want to satisfy the client, but the success of the project is viewed very differently.

Architectural guidelines: the way forward

What should be done as a consequence of these and other differences has been the subject of much debate. At the same time, the desire to achieve the 'Holy Grail' of integration is becoming stronger as a result of increased pressure from client organisations.

With this in mind, a CIBSE-led project¹ is producing a guide for architects on effective team working with services engineers. Due to appear this summer, Building services design process: the guide for architects and other design professionals advocates improved communications, mutual respect and co-operation.

Structured to follow the logic of the construction process, the guide looks at how the interaction between the architect and services engineer – and between each party and the client – could be improved at each stage of the design process. It will help services engineers show architects how the engineering can help them put their concepts into practice.

The guide shows the benefits of improved interaction to all parties, particularly the advantages of drawing on the expertise of the services engineer at an early stage. This means that the services engineer will be able to make positive contributions towards improving the realisation of the architect's concepts, rather than seek to remedy by brute force what could have been avoided by an earlier input.

Sustainable and integrated design

A successful, integrated design is one which gives the client the functional performance required in the most effective and economic manner. This will increasingly include the need to provide an economically and environmentally sustainable design.

In the case of this guide, it also encompasses the process by which the design team co-operates on those aspects of the design where this could enhance the quality of the final product.

The guide is one step along the path to change. Cross-disciplinary cpd, training in the practicalities of team building and awareness raising are still needed as part of the educational process.

Still, if the new guide gets everyone talking about the issues, and architects looking to engineers to help them achieve their conceptual designs, it will have done its job.