By Sarah Sindian, AIA, NCARB
Design, like people, can be messy. The dream of becoming an architect is getting into a precise profession and honing that perfect mix of creative and technical skill. However, the day-to-day work is a lot of emailing and phone tag. Some days there are three-hour conference calls to work through consultant co-ordination while requests for information (RFIs) and client comments pile up. Other days, architects have settled into a creative flow, making great progress, only to discover the beautifully worked out unit plan or amenity space they vetted through now needs structural to re-evaluate.
The most common obstacles to the design process occur when each consultant or contractor is working independently, creating single-purpose plans without consulting each other’s work. Mechanical ducts come into conflict with structural beams, soffits, or ceiling design. Perforations in exterior walls seem to appear where a shear wall needs to go; exhaust and intake vents start to poke through an elegant facade. Conflict happens, but good collaboration puts project teams on the same page early, and leads to a co-ordinated set, preventing any late design or construction phase “surprises” along the way.
Transparent, even-handed communication between the architect and consultants is the key to prompt, low-stress design processes. Good collaboration between all the project’s moving parts creates thorough, efficient design that results in a rigorous set of documents, strong returns for the client, and a positive impact on neighbourhoods around the project.
Nothing slows the process down more than losing time solving for technical problems that could detected earlier. The challenge for architects is the design of a building including so much outside their scope. If architects want to be effective project team leaders, they need to understand the other professionals who make buildings livable for people. Specifically, they need to understand the work of structural, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (SMEP) engineers. And not just the fundamentals of SMEP engineering, but how SMEP consultants think and act; how they form a creative part of the project team.
No leader has ever fallen into an efficient and effective design process by accident. Co-ordination is the crucial step, but to be successful, architects need to take specific positions in three key areas: leadership, expertise, and execution.
Leadership
All teams need a leader and it is often, but not exclusively, the architect who fills this role. The architect exists as the project team leader and creative partner. Good leaders advocate for their work and that of the designers under them, but they should equally understand and advocate for the consultants’ work. If architects want to leverage all their best resources, they need to understand what their consultants need to enable their best work. To do this, the author started tailoring their meeting agendas to include more items that were in the form of questions to the consultants. Instead of telling, started asking. What are the best systems for this project, the best designs, the best approaches? After shifting the tone and structure of these meetings, the author saw the consultants take on a greater part of the shared vision for the work. The consultants became more involved participants through each step of the process because they felt a greater sense of contribution and recognition. The lesson learnt is to take full advantage of the consultants as the resources they are—do not just maximize their potential, but also develop strong working relationships with the other parts of the project team.
Architects should make a conscious effort to establish trust and rapport whenever they start a new project. Communication is the key to collaboration, and doing so in a respectful way is decisive when establishing trust and confidence in the team and aligning goals. Consistently touching base, perhaps weekly, via phone or email, is a good way to establish that rapport and maintain open lines of communication. Everyone on the team should show a level of respect for each other as a baseline expectation. It is important to recognize who the experts are in their portion of the project and respectfully stick to each other’s area of expertise. The team dynamic benefits when everyone is a valuable contributor to the whole, and there is a unified front and sense of teamwork during the decision-making process.
Expertise
The work of SMEP consultants includes all the unseen systems that make buildings work. The electrical raceways within the cavities of the walls and floors, the mechanical units tucked away in closets, the plumbing pipes concealed in floors and walls, and the structural bones that make the building stand. All these components require space and specific dimensions that need to be distributed during initial design phases. Finding space only gets more challenging as the project progresses. Utilitarian spaces such as electrical closets, mechanical fan rooms, and maintenance rooms are always needed but easily overlooked.
Nothing beats experience in a trade like architecture. Experience is the king of problem solving, founded on a history of lessons learned. Over time, people will find they have learned more from working with different trades in the field than they could have learned from books or in school. There is something special that happens when collaborating with people in action, something that happens between the lines and through various levels of interaction.
For instance, the author worked on a particular project where their design team needed to understand their options for the structural design of a podium building. The size and spacing of structural columns affect the livability of a space, so understanding these dimensions from the beginning allowed the team to design a better building. For this project, the design team started by laying out the structural concrete columns in response to the parking garage on the lower levels. These columns needed to extend all the way into the upper levels for this construction type-I building.
However, they encountered a problem—the column layout worked well for the parking garage below but did not work well for the livability of the dwelling units above. The author collaborated with the structural engineer to see how they could make the columns work for both the living levels and the parking garage. In some instances, the structural engineer removed a column and added a transfer beam, thereby creating a longer span between columns and causing less interruption within the dwelling unit. In other instances, the design team adjusted columns to hide them within walls or closets instead of occupying the middle of a living room. Since there was an open line of communication and an established trust with the structural engineer, the team was able to work creatively to design a building where units were not just livable but inviting, and where the amenity spaces encouraged gathering rather than separation. This was only possible because everyone worked together during schematic design, when a major structural change does not have a major impact on the timeline.
Problem-solving and execution
Some design teams pin up every single floor plan on a board and have each SMEP consultant draw their diagrammatic layout in a different coloured marker. Time-consuming as this is, it is still easier to make changes on paper than tear down and rebuild walls in the field. Now with the help of Bluebeam overlays, there is a sense of elbow-to-elbow collaboration when working with other consultants. In co-ordinating with consultants, teams still overlay floor plans, including architectural, structural, mechanical, plumbing, and electrical. The floorplan from each discipline is given a different colour so that when overlaid, they can discern the different trades and identify problematic areas where a mechanical duct might conflict with a structural beam, or a plumbing line is routing through an electrical subpanel.
While with design, modelling, and communication tools, it is important to recognize software is just a set of tools that aids in completing tasks, and it is learned knowledge and experience that truly drives any decisions. Technology can become a crutch, and, at the end of the day, architects should draw from expertise and experience to make informed decisions. It is key, however, to stay completely conscious through every part of the process because professionals make the final call, not the software.
The design process can be quite technical, but even working with technical consultants is an organic, creative process. It involves experience, knowledge, creativity, and the room to follow design instincts. Beyond initial design, stitching together the work of the major disciplines is an important part of the architect’s role. By taking on a strategic mindset, and by working alongside other consultants to problem solve during a collaborative work session, design teams achieve better results that leads to active, thriving communities. The SMEP professionals who orchestrate the different systems within the building are design partners working toward a unified goal.
The author has worked on several projects where the structural engineer worked proactively with not only them as the architect but also the interior designer. Specifically, they helped design the columns into the layout, ensuring they were hidden. With large amenity spaces, a column may likely end up in the middle of the room, but there is some flexibility, and shifting a column is possible. Asking the structural engineer to shift the column a few inches or a couple feet to conceal it within an architectural element, such as a pop out that lines up with the coffered ceiling above, is not out of the question and can make it possible for what is constructed to align with the design intent.
When design partners work toward this level of collaboration and develop a system that makes partnering with consultants more fluid, an instinctive type of understanding develops for the other disciplines. For example, interior designers will usually want linear diffusers in the amenity spaces; that structural will want bearing walls to stack and shear walls at exterior walls between windows to be at least 0.7-m (2.5-ft)-wide; that electrical will almost always layout the kitchen outlets and teams will need to problem solve together on how to achieve accessibility to those outlets. After gaining experience in a specific field, professionals develop a level of intuition about these details.
Conclusion
It takes time to lay the groundwork for this kind of rapport, co-ordination, and design workflow. When architects co-ordinate early and consistently, and when they understand their role as project leader and creative partner, then they start building the trust and developing the processes that lead to outstanding work. Collaborative design makes construction more efficient because the entire team is mindful of how the lines drawn on paper translate to the built product. The value this brings to the client is the ability to save time and money through value engineering in a way that does not have a negative impact on the design esthetic. Together, all disciplines can think ahead, and detail projects to reduce the amount of concrete formwork, reducing labour and material costs. By being a team player, architects can review potential substitutions to give the client some wiggle room in their budget, saving on costs or creating construction efficiency, while staying true to design intent.
The construction document (CD) set is the byproduct of all the collaboration throughout the distinct phases of design. A collaborative, well co-ordinated team, with open lines of communication and a process rooted in the respect of each individual discipline as part of the whole, will reflect in a good set of drawings. Rather than conflict between each consultant’s sets of drawings, there will be alignment across the board. Collaboration requires professionals to step outside of themselves—outside of their preformed judgements and limitations. Collaboration creates the space to be open-minded about other opinions and points of view—in turn enlightening and challenging any preconceived notions—and that is where the magic happens.
Author
Sarah Sindian brings more than 20 years of experience to KTGY. Since joining KTGY in early 2003, she has managed a variety of projects from single-family dwellings to high-density podium buildings, urban infill residential and mixed-use developments. With work extending from southern to northern California, she understands the complexities associated with differing regions and jurisdictions. Sindian’s portfolio includes many successfully built projects that have benefited from her dedication and problem-solving skills.
