Comment by bluenose69 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bluenose69 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I've seen similar things where I work. In a new building, the architects called for small air vents that would look nice according to some aesthetic criterion. Unfortunately, the vents were so small that, to maintain air flow, the fans inside them had to spin so fast they screamed. This made for a very unpleasant environment.

This was where high-profile events tended to take place, to show off the bright new shiny things. But you couldn't hear yourself think there. The solution? They turned off the fans a short time before important visitors arrived.

I learned of this when I was chatting with a worker who deals with such things. Apparently, the people who were installing these vents knew that they would be a problem. But who were they going to complain to? The architects don't work here, and the local managers don't listen to their underlings.

There are lots of stories like this in many work environments. I think the common thread is that high mucky-mucks are not interested in talking with the people who are doing the labour.

This is a negative outcome of the Town and Country Planning Act. We've mandated by law that all planning is done upfront and due to the possibility of construction fraud provide detailed designs to building contractors that disallow them from substituting any materials or design choices without it being explicitly requested by the employer. In theory, there can be conversation between individual subcontractors and the project managers or architects, but in practice these are not always on site at the same time and there are significant costs involved in changes as well as issues with trust. Therefore, we effectively have a very expensive waterfall process that everybody is legally obligated to follow.

If it's your project, you can order the builders to reconfigure the ventilation ducts pretty much however you like.

Building control require that an architect sign off on things like the size of the beam holding the roof up. If you change that, the architect will have to sign off on the building as constructed before building control will approve it.

Planning permission is given on the basis of external appearance, so you can't change too much in that area - but go look at some planning applications, they're very light on details.

But other than that? If it's your project and you tell the electrician putting in a socket to put it somewhere else, he'll tell you if it's legal under the wiring regulations, and if it is, he'll move it.

The main reason that in large projects builders are required to build exactly to the plan is to stop them substituting cheaper materials. They're under great pressure to do that, because if you allow your builders to replace expensive zinc cladding with cheap ACM cladding, and you ask several builders to tender and choose the cheapest builder, you'll always choose the builder who quoted on the basis of the cheap ACM cladding.

In a small house you can move outlets. In a large building the space for every wire and pipe is accounted for. Moving the outlet means that the wires to it have to move and in turn that means a plumber later can't come in and put the pipe where it must go. In a house they solve this by having the plumber come in before the electrician (the order is much more complex), but in a large building you need them working at the same time or you will never get done. Even in a house you still need to plan the plumbing as often a pipe and a beam need to go through the same place - either the beam moves or the toilet moves.

Sometimes - but some large buildings have loads of space above suspended ceilings and in cable trays and suchlike. Office buildings know every new tenant might want to move internal walls, rearrange sockets, reconfigure the kitchen and so on, and they're built with that in mind.

You're right that making arbitrary ad-hoc changes during construction can be expensive, of course. Especially if it's wrong and has to be torn out and redone.

But it's not illegal - if you're in charge of a project and an installer tells you the specified vents are going to be a problem and they recommend a bigger one, nothing in law prevents you from telling them to go ahead and make the change, right there on the spot.

Of course, how often the person with in charge of a large project will be talking to the vent installers while they're working is a different matter...

Many buildings are designed that way. It is a useful thing to do, but there are trade offs - you pay for that extra space in other materials and extra time. For an office the office/cubes/open layout is installed by the renters after they lease the building and thus the space you are talking about isn't part of the initial construction effort. They still plan/reserve space for the pipes and large wires in initial construction. Generally the bathrooms and break rooms (kitchens/cafeteria) would be done in initial construction and so carefully planned out.

It of course isn't illegal to make changes - but it is expensive and thus not something you should do. (though some things are much easier than others to retrofit half way in.

I don't think you disagree with me. For larger projects, like infrastructure projects, very detailed designs are used and contracts that disallow substitutions or alterations to the design without contractual agreement.

I'm talking with some level of experience here. I did a residential project that was obviously much smaller than this but still very expensive (£100+k). Even for this architects recommended a detailed design and a contract that enforced this.

Building is not a waterfall process because of the Planning act. It's waterfall because of the cost structure of building. Every time you iterate physically, you are throwing a lot of money away in time and materials. So any iteration is pushed back to the paper part of the exercise, in which case it might just as well happen before planning approval.

Also, it's possible to request a variation, especially if something wasn't going to work. There is a category called 'non-material variation' which the planning officers are lenient with.

If you got rid of planning (and building control) I guarantee that the quality of buildings would go down. Before building control, many unhealthy buildings were built due to bad drainage, etc.

> It's waterfall because of the cost structure of building. Every time you iterate physically, you are throwing a lot of money away in time and materials.

Also it's because of the financial structure. People invest a lot of money in something with a delayed, sometimes for years. Delay increases everyone's risk, increases interest expense, and defers revenue.

Building is - or should be - iterative. However each building is a separate iteration. Once you are done you stop and look at what works and what doesn't, then adjust the next one. The more you make your building different/unique from what everyone else around you is doing the more expensive it will be as nobody knows what changes really work - and even if they are for the better the lack of experience means you are paying extra for the laborers to figure out how to do things.

This reminds me of the weird AC behaviour at one of the London office buildings I used to work in. The AC or heating would turn on or off seemingly at random and when enough people complained about it (i.e. our CEO got sick one more time) it was revealed that the building is managed remotely by a company from Iowa and the thermostat that controlled our building was installed in their office and not in London. I was glad my contract ended and was not interested in renewing.

Same issue as UX and features in enterprise software. When a product is sold to people who don't have to use it then optics are more important than practicality

Reply on news.ycombinator.com