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Building Business Using Integrated Design for High Performance Buildings

There is a rapidly growing movement in the U.S. among building owners and developers, to demand the delivery of sustainable buildings from their project teams. A critically important part of sustainability is reducing energy consumption in buildings.

Architectural and engineering firms that intend to design buildings that use significantly less energy will need to employ integrated design in order to do so. By integrated design, we mean not only having architectural and core engineering disciplines begin their collaboration in the early development of design concepts, but also use that collaboration to search for synergies among climate, use, design, and building systems, that will result in increased performance, while reducing project first cost and operating expense.

Simply put, design firms that work this way will be more successful in creating high performing buildings. As a result, these firms will be considered by clients and potential clients as more desirable. Given the trend toward client expectations of sustainability in their projects, the opportunity is considerable for design professionals who excel in this area.

Establishing Plans To Achieve Goals For Leadership

The essence of Strategic Planning is in thinking clearly about where to go in the future, and committing to a direction and specific goals to achieve it; and developing strategies that will help one succeed in achieving these goals and this direction. Check out Establishing a Strategic Plan for Design Firms for ideas on getting started.

Declaring a direction, and setting goals and measurable objectives is a commitment to a path for one's firm. This commitment is important to move a firm and its leaders from ideas to action.

If a design practice sets the direction of being a leader in the design of sustainable, high performing buildings, and establishes measurable objectives for its projects and its skills development, it is more likely to succeed.

The annual Business Plan should also incorporate specific outcomes to be accomplished that year, in support of the overall strategic goal for leadership in designing high-performance buildings. A design firm should monitor its progress toward these outcomes as the year progresses.

Finally, the annual Marketing Plan should detail a firm's program for finding clients and winning projects that have goals for sustainability.

Selling Integrated Design and High Performance Buildings to Owners

As the number of clients that expect buildings to perform at a high level increases, architects and engineers seeking to provide services to them will need to be convincing about their skills and approach. The methods used in the past, which rely primarily on showing a firm's past projects, will no longer work.

An equally big task is persuading owners who are not yet committed to high performance buildings. You need to convince them to allow for new design approaches to create such buildings. Many design professionals have stated that their clients are often skeptical or resistant. Their biggest hurdle is in convincing this group of owners of the economic justification for energy efficient design options. To overcome this hurdle, an architect or engineer will need to demonstrate how these design options will improve building functions, enhance occupant satisfaction, cost no more to build than comparable conventional buildings, and reduce operating expense over time. See "The Business Case for High Performance Buildings". (Coming soon.)

As more sustainable, high performance buildings are built, the data related to their costs and impact on the building occupants will be available on this web site and others.

Assembling the Best Project Teams

To design high performance buildings requires a high performance team. (See "Sample RFP" link to RFP) Both the architectural and the engineering disciplines need to be led by professionals that are able to collaborate in a new way, and to explore new approaches to design solutions. Architects need engineers who can think conceptually and participate in the early design process. Engineers need architects who regard them as partners in the process, and who consider engineering solutions as form-givers to the architecture. All participants need to learn new ways of working together, in order to succeed at integrated design.

As design practice evolves, the importance of specialty consultants for energy modeling, commissioning, and other services related to high performance also increases.

Professionals from each discipline who work over and over again with each other are often able to reach new heights that aren't achievable from one-time teams. Well-known practitioners recommend that architects and engineers develop strong long-term working relationships, share fees equitably, and behave like partners and co-creators in order to achieve the necessary breakthroughs in building design.