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Client, architect, and Construction manager must perform a delicate balancing act to shrink the construction process and save time and money.

By Barbara Knecht

The role of design

Most design professionals believe that only nonspecialized building types with repetitive spaces and standard construction make suitable candidates for fast-track construction. “In cases where you are doing a one-off, customized building, the more you speed up the construction time, the harder it is to get things coordinated, the less iteration in design, the more mistakes, and the longer punch list you will end up with,” explains James Timberlake, FAIA, of Kieran Timberlake in Philadelphia, who, with his partner, Stephan Kieran, FAIA, is researching ways to speed up the construction process by borrowing methods and processes from other industries [Record, January 2002, page 131].

The low-tech, but highly effective, “Dynamic Calendar” (below) consists of hundreds of Post-It notes, which focus on the Who/What/When interrelationships of critical path issues. The office wings (above) are standard curtain wall construction. The curtain wall was designed with cable-tensioned trusses (left).

Even those architects who have embraced fast-tracking methods are concerned about design quality when so many decisions are literally fixed in concrete and steel before all the iterations and details have been studied. When schedule dictates the process, there isn’t time to study and revise the design as more is learned through development of details; materials and structural systems may be imposed for expediency rather than optimal design.

Steve McConnell, design principal at Seattle-based NBBJ, believes the Reebok Headquarters in Canton, Massachusetts, is one of his firm’s best-designed buildings. Reebok was more than six months into design when it concluded that its first architect didn’t share the company’s vision for the future. After conducting a limited competition for new concepts, Reebok selected NBBJ on the strength of its ideas and the expectation that the firm would deliver the building within 31 months.

Faced with stiff penalties if they were unable to vacate their offices by midsummer of 2000, fast tracking became the only solution. NBBJ’s ability to produce a 522,000-square-foot headquarters within the schedule constraints and tight budget depended on making design decisions early and having a disciplined team to produce the documents. The client accepted the design concept without major revision, because, according to McConnell, NBBJ addressed all Reebok’s needs in the first presentation. From that point, the team decided to solve the hardest design challenge first—a structural system that wouldn’t obstruct views through the 330-foot, curved-and-canted, steel-and-glass spine curtain wall. By making this dominating architectural element the first order of business, the architect had sufficient design time and was able to gain the confidence of the client regarding both cost and concept.