Category: 2: MAKING BUILDINGS

Certain themes are woven throughout this book and surface again and again in different, often widely varying contexts. These represent a set of concerns that fall into two broad categories: building performance and building construction. The performance concerns relate to the inescapable problems that must be confronted in every building: fire; building movement of every…

Improving Collaboration Among Team Members The design and construction industry continues to evolve, testing innovative organizational structures and project delivery methods in which designers, builders, and owners assume less adversarial and less compartmentalized roles. Such approaches share characteristics such as: • Contractual relationships and working arrangements that foster collaboration between project members • Participation of…

Providing Construction Services An owner wishing to construct a building hopes to achieve a finished project that meets its functional requirements and its expectations for design and quality, at the lowest possible cost, and on a predictable schedule. A contractor offering its construction services hopes to produce quality work, earn a profit, and complete the…

The tasks of the architect and the engineer would be impossible to carry out without the support of dozens of standards-setting agencies, trade associations, professional organizations, and other groups that produce and disseminate information on materials and methods of construction, some of the most important of which are discussed in the sections that follow. Standards-Setting…

A building begins as an idea in someone’s mind, a desire for new and ample accommodations for a family, many families, an organization, or an enterprise. For any but the smallest buildings, the next step for the owner of the prospective building is to engage, either directly or through a hired construction manager, the services…

In constructing and occupying buildings, we expend vast quantities of the earth’s resources and generate a significant portion of the earth’s environmental pollution: The U.S. Green Building Council reported in 2008 that buildings account for 30 to 40 percent of the world’s energy use and associated greenhouse gas emissions. Construction and operation of buildings in…

Throughout this book many alternative ways of building are described: different structural systems, different systems of enclosure, and different systems of interior finish. Each system has characteristics that distinguish it from the alternatives. Sometimes a system is distinguished chiefly by its visual qualities, as one might acknowledge in choosing one type of granite over another,…