Integrated Design and LEED

On Monday, September 14th, I taught my first full lecture at our ENVR 119, Green Building Design, Construction and Operations class at the Harvard Extension School. The class was well attended (about 40 people in the classroom) and was watched by many more live via the web. For the first time we had an online chat room up so that people could talk to each other during the class and ask questions, which teaching fellow Andrea Ruedy Trimble would read aloud. We know at least one student watched from Brazil and we expect the class from Tsinghua University in China to watch the recorded version. Tsinghua University has partnered with the Extension School to offer our class at their University, watching our lectures and using our assignments, but grading their own papers and supplementing our lectures with their own introductions.

The class on Monday was extended to three hours instead of its usual two hour format. For the first hour, I spoke about Integrated Design. The class asked lots of good questions and we had excellent participation. Rafal Shurma spoke next for one hour about international green building rating systems. It always makes me smile to see BREAM for Prisons as a formal rating system. Finally, I spoke from 9:30 to 10:30 pm about the US Green Building Council's LEED Rating System. I talked about the overall structure of the LEED system and then walked through the specific environmental attributes identified in the 2009 version of LEED for New Construction and Major Renovations. We also announced a study group for students wanting to prepare for the LEED Green Associate examination. A surprisingly high percentage of students stayed in class until 10:30 and about 5 even stuck around to ask questions. Copies of both of my presentations are attached.

Integrated Design Question

From "LEED Accredited Professional" group on LinkedIn:

Wondering how to conduct an integrated design for a public project that must be bid out? How does one get contractors involved in the process? Anyone with experience on this? - Heather McGuire

This issue comes up in any traditional design-bid-build job (public or private). How do you have an "integrated" design when one of the key parties is not at the table? Similar issue if you're trying for integrated design in a speculative building when you don't have an operator or a tennant identified. I don't think there is an easy / one-size-fits-all answer, but you need to find a proxy for the missing party. If you don't have a GC on board, you can hire a Construction Manager as advisor during the design process and he or she can represent the contractor. Even if you can't go with a CM, lots of public bid jobs let you hire a Cost Estimator who could serve the purpose (a good Estimator can also talk about constructability). If no CM or Estimator is on board, the Project Manager could wear this hat. As a last resort, the Architect and Engineers can get preliminary costs for the various design options by calling vendors and sub-contractors. You might also invite a number of GC's to the design charettes with no promise of future work, but a definite advantage when it comes time to bid.

On a somewhat related note, it might be helpful to follow a formal Integrated Design process (something like ANSI WSIP - include as a contract requirement of all consultants) and use Life Cycle Costing to evaluate your different design options. For LCC, it is easier if you look at your costs using UniFormat (arranged by system) instead of MasterFormat (arranged by material) to really identify the trade-offs. You might also want to bring in your Commissioning Authority early (conceptual or schematic design) and have him/her participate in the charette process. This way the CxA can help pull together the Owner's Project Requirements early in design so the design team can refer to them in each of their design submittals. - Nathan