In a Construction Dimension article from 1998 titled The Architect, the Contractor and the Lost Art of Communication (A Contractor’s Viewpoint), S.G. Saucerman said of architects, “If you’ve been a contractor for a while (like me), it’s likely that you’ve come in contact with an architect. This likelihood increases further if you tend to do a lot of commercial work, where indeed it can be hard to swing a dead cat without hitting an architect.”
In a July 2019 article from the same publication titled The Architect: Friend or Foe?, author Ulf Wolf says of relationships with architects: “a clear case of ‘can’t live with them, can’t live without them…”
Clearly the relationship between architects and contractors is complex, and at times, during the design and build, controversial or confrontational. Obviously, when it works, it works and when it doesn’t, it can really “go south” with the owner and the rest of the build team paying the price both literally and figuratively.
Phil Bernstein, FAIA, RIBA, LEED AP, associate dean and senior lecturer at the Yale School of Architecture, and an Autodesk fellow is currently writing a series of articles in Architect Magazine that addresses the issue of architect/contractor conflict and summarizes ways that he found from those Autodesk workshops and conversations to make the relationships much smoother. The articles are summaries based on interviews and conversations in six sessions sponsored by Autodesk with 100 owners, contractors, and architects from around the globe.
In the first of the articles, he explains the basic definitional contractional difference in this way:
By tradition, contract, or legal standard, architects and engineers are not charged with creating “construction-ready” information but rather with what is called in legal parlance “design intent deliverables,” which describe the end-state of construction prior to the instantiation of the contractor’s knowledge. (Construction strategy, means and methods, material selections, and specific detailing often manifest in shop drawings.) It’s not the intent here to argue the efficacy of this particular structural process challenge, but rather to suggest that as digital tools are built—bespoke—for different players in the AEC supply chain, these tools will, absent larger theories of new interactions and standards, be, by definition, incompatible.
From the other side of the table, it is said that:
“Architects (and too many others) view construction as a commodity. They believe that purchasing construction services is like buying a car, you'll get the same thing no matter what dealer you visit, the only difference is the price.” “Architects used to know about construction and design, based on actual experience. That's not the case any longer.”
There is another view of architecture expressed by architect, designer, and founder of Ted Talks, Richard Saul Wurman, FAIA, RIBA, who says of the profession in a recent interview in ArchDaily:
I miss architecture. My goal in life was to be a great architect. I love architecture, but I do not love, like, or tolerate the accident of a client, or what they might want me to do. I don’t like being told what to do, I instead like to discuss what to do. I am convinced that a good client can make a building much better, but you are also owned by your client, and I don’t think I’m making any great headlines by saying that. The frustration of even the most famous architects is that they work for a client, and that they spend a lot of time coddling and pleasing the client. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have clients. What I’m saying is that you can’t control your client, and that it takes up a major part of your day and life.
Furman expresses the thought of many architects that not just the contractors, but owners also get in the way of the architect’s vision.
You can see that there is a tremendous opportunity for the architect and the contractor to miscommunicate and at the same time there is a tremendous opportunity for productive partnerships.
The nature of those relationships depends on the owner, and that can vary all over the map. Both the architect and the contractor have separate contractual agreements with the owner and even if those are standard AIA agreements, they vary greatly and are sometimes in conflict.
Whether the owner is an institution, a serial builder, an investor, a speculative developer, a user, or any combination of those, the three-way working relationship makes all the difference not only to the design and build process, but also to the fifty-year life of the finished product and to the tenants and users who may never know whether the architect and the contractor were colleagues or enemies on the project. Bernstein, in his articles, says that the basis for the best relationships, whether in life or in construction, is trust.
Bernstein also proposes that the explosion of technology on a number of different platforms creates an even more difficult “Tower of Babel” problem and complicates the build process even further. His findings and the resultant articles make for an interesting and enlightening read.
In the design-bid-build process that has been in play for the last 100 years, many owners have adopted the “low price” approach and that leads to all types of games that we have alluded to in other posts. The introduction of BIM Level 2 and other technologies that are not only making the build team more productive but have created a basis for a cogent conversation among the parties, sometimes approaching 100 separate subs on a major build.
This is not meant to indicate that it is genetic or inherent that the architect and contractor have difficulty working together, only that there are several basic flaws in the way we do business that creates the environment where the miscommunication can occur.
There are a number of developer-owners like Hines Investments and Skanska who have found ways to develop high-quality projects in multiple cities on multiple continents and who have worked with the top design architects across multiple platforms. It is just that there is lots of room for improvement.
Recently I ran across a project that is currently in the design stage in Dallas. It is named “The Link-at-Uptown” and is being developed as a design-build project under the direction of a development company named Kaizen Development Partners (Japanese for continuous improvement) and the design-build team was assembled from the get-go to make this a productive successful project. The owner-developer, Kaizen, brought together the architect, Boka Powell, the contractor, Balfour Beatty, and mechanical contractor, TD Industries, to form a design-build team for the project.
The main point that this project approach makes is that by bringing together the total team from the beginning, trust and productivity become the core of the project team. Another executive with a major GC told me the exact same thing this past week when I asked him, “What is the most important key to a successful project.”
In the podcast conversation in this post from TD Industries, each of the players tells how the design-build team of trusted companies is able to work together to create a more productive build and a higher quality final product for the tenants and residents who will be the users of the building during its useful life.
Three things keep nagging at me. An AGC study determined that new construction and infrastructure equal to the amount that exists today will be built between today and 2030 in the US. The second is that 40% of the construction materials for a building under our current approach is wasted. The third thing is that as much as 25% of all construction today has to be re-done to make it right. The combination of those three things alone seems to me to make it imperative that we find better ways for architects and contractors to work together and we need to do it now.
