ArchitectAnon

The structural frame is easy. Stick frame, CLT, SIPs already exist and are better than this basically everything except a blockwork structure already takes less than a week. Insulation, airtightness and services integration is hard. Services takes way longer than the frame.

Good point, in a hot climate with air conditioning, everything works in reverse in summer. My perspective is Northern Europe; consult a local expert.

Yes of course, but I was thinking more in terms of DIYers jamming a lot of non-breathable eps into old houses. Probably better to say consult someone who knows what they’re talking about before you internally insulate your old house.

One note of caution, he describes removing the lath and plaster and inserting eps insulation. It didn’t mention if he did this, he might have done, but it’s important to have a continuous taped vapour barrier on the warm side of the insulation to prevent water vapour from passing through, condensing on the timber structure and causing it to rot. Also ventilate the cold side of the insulation or a least have a gap to form a capillary break with the cold outside wall. I’ve seen a few badly done insulation jobs in timber buildings that have needed floor joists and studs cut out and replaced. It only takes about 15-20 years.

I think it takes a while for the juices to equalise and reach equilibrium before it’s running at max efficiency. You don’t want a duty cycle of say 15mins. You want say 1.5hrs. Something like that. (Numbers very hand wavy this is not my field directly) With an over designed system it stops and starts too quickly and this invalidates the warranty on commercial systems.

Plastic pipes have a really bad reputation for joint failures in the construction industry in the UK. I’ve heard of whole commercial buildings having plastic pipes fail all over the place during commissioning resulting in the whole lot getting stripped out and replaced with copper. I always specify copper piping because it’s a lower risk for me.

More like 7%. But that’s for a completely custom design from scratch not just reprocessing an off the shelf design.

Maybe I am because I should switch careers, I’m visually literate; pretty sure I could do graphics as good as that. I’m also computer literate I’ve used bootstrap, I know how it works. I also code python well enough to understand how create my own decorators and where might be a good place to use yield and I know how to use git. Put up my own website using Jekll AWS, wrote some jekll plugins in Ruby. Dabbled in Arduino ESP PIC Etc etc

Edit: Basically it feels like I currently do an order of magnitude more work for the same money.

Also if I agreed to a fee of £7k and tried to charge a client £46k without agreeing a new scope of work with a new signed appointment contract I would probably be struck off and fined £20k by my professional regulator.

$46k for those changes holy fucking shit. I’ve charged less than this to design a whole 200m² house. I built a detailed 3d model, secured all the permissions and technical approvals, produced 30 A1 drawings, written a 200 page spec, coordinated engineering, tendered to contractors negotiated the tender, visited the site every two weeks for two years to check they were building it correctly and signed off on thier invoices to the client. This is a normal amount of work for that fee in my industry, am I an idiot?

Construction materials is something like 30%

Steam from showers sets off some types of smoke detectors as well. I know of a student halls of residence that had them. In the uk that type of building is classified as high risk so the alarm system is directly connected to the fire brigade. Cue grumpy firemen making students stand out in the rain at 1 in the morning every couple of days while they search the building for a non existent fire.

Also Kansai airport [0] had to cope with this issue, complicated by the fact that it's built on reclaimed land and the whole thing is (or was) on software controlled hydraulic jacks which control differential settlement.

[0] http://www.rpbw.com/project/kansai-international-airport-ter...

[1] http://engineering-timelines.com/scripts/engineeringItem.asp...

Back in the mid 2000's I tried to point out to the people writing the UK BIM standards why it was a bad idea to have all buildings drawn relative to the OS grid datum which is somewhere southwest of the Scilly Isles for exactly this reason. I even tried to explain that computers can't do accurate floating point calculations and they didn't believe me! And then CAD consultants are surprised when automatic 2D drawing generation from 3D models randomly fails to work properly (usually at 10pm the night before a big deadline) and then everyone wonders why architects are backwards and don't want to adopt 3D processes...

Here’s a what I do in my industry: Architecture. I refuse invitation to tender for services where there are more than 3 bidders. I phone the person managing the tender and ask if they have a preferred Architect already and I say that I don’t mind if they do and I’m happy to provide a tender so they can show they’ve tried to get 3 bids but I would rather not waste a week putting together a proposal and a concept design etc. This works well for me.

Open tenders are typically won by firms that specialise in scatter gun bidding and the results will usually be poor quality. A firm with a good design track record doesn’t need to win work this way so they won’t waste time on them.

My theory is it’s common law contracting systems combined with government and industry wanting to push time and cost risk down the chain of subcontractors as far as possible. This leads to a situation where market forces are aligned to generate epic amounts of bureaucracy and unwillingness to be flexible. ‘I can’t do that because this was supposed to be ready for me to start’ or a part that costs 3x more even though there’s an exact equivalent generic component from a different brand but the expensive one is in the specification and a contractor won’t suggest a substitution because then it’s thier design risk. As an architect I’m very cautious about specifying anything innovative, because when it goes wrong in my experience the suppliers always find a way to get out of any warranty promises and everyone tries to blame me to get my PI insurance to pay for it. I’ve been stung before by being too trusting of product manufacturer’s claims and this had poisoned the well for anyone coming after them with something new they want me to try out.

From memory 40% of people in the UK construction industry admit to offering or receiving a bribe. [0] Western countries are not immune to this. I’m aware of situations where large cash bribes were paid or holidays were given by subcontractors to the bid managers at a large construction company to fix tenders to secure work.

[0] Construction Project Manager’s Pocket Book (Routledge Pocket Books) (it’s research reffered to in the ethics section somewhere, you can use look inside to view on Amazon)

If you think plumbers don’t have undefined requirements and random deadlines out of their control then you don’t know enough about the industry. Most plumbers are juggling about 20 different projects plus call-outs and with the chaos in the UK construction industry right now, it’s very hard for any tradesperson to predict where they will be working and what they will be doing next week. You will have annoyed people constantly phoning you all day to find out when you are going to be at their site. However, plumbers are in huge demand at the moment and can probably easily invoice more than £300 per day, it’s just a question of the building sites being ready for them to work a few consecutive days in a row to get those billable hours racked up day after day. There are a lot of inefficiencies in project scheduling, especially with the currently difficulties.

I’m not an engineer but I am an architect and I have worked closely with engineers on skyscrapers. Drilling all the way down to the bedrock is risky. When you drill a deep pile you need to use bentonite slurry to stop the pile collapsing in on itself, the pile auger is withdrawn and then a long pipe is used to introduce concrete from the bottom of the the pile which should displace the slurry out of the top because it is less dense than the concrete. However, this process doesn’t always work and you get bentonite inclusions in the concrete which are found when the pile is tested ultrasonically afterwards. I don’t remember the stats but lets say it’s something like 1 in 10 piles fail the test when you drill to 50m deep bedrock through clay. You then have to drill two more either side of the original pile and bridge over the defective pile but these each have the same risk of inclusions, so there’s an increased risk the workaround will fail. As you can imagine this can get pretty complicated and expensive quickly. As an architect I was involved because we needed to have a backup plan for how the basement would be reorganised if there were a lot of piling failures requiring extra bridging structures.

Big skyscrapers in London use a similar friction pile technique. E.g The Cheesegrater sits on friction piles which I believe are ø2.5m x 25m long.

The ‘Wedding Cake’ style of architecture requires a lot of ‘fondant icing’ stuck to the outside which is made from expensive and highly labour intensive materials, hand carved stone typically. To take my cake metaphor to far, you can put too much icing on it and it becomes a sugar sculpture full of cardboard props and bits of wire, not something you would enjoy eating.

A well designed building in the renaissance style is beautiful but this style also places arbitrary constraints on the design, like symmetry, which make them inefficient and very hard to design convincingly while still meeting the brief for the modern spaces inside. That’s why they’re not built like this anymore. There are a plenty of badly proportioned late 20th Century faux classical buildings out there and to me they stick out like poor typography does to a graphic designer or bad punctuation for an editor.

As other comments have pointed out the big problem with buildings in many US cities and European suburbs that developed after ww2 is mostly with urban planning failing to create walkable cities. Spain and Holland have had different approaches but I think they are the most successful in Europe.

I've worked on some mega projects as well, and the key to being on time and on budget is to manage the PR so that no-one knows when it's supposed to be completed and how much it's going to cost. The only difference between Crossrail and private sector projects is that there is no press scoutiny over how much over budget they have gone and how late they are.

Germany has this. They’re not a poor country.

Architecture is pretty similar. Some firms are OK, I know friends who have worked for some of the big name Starchitects and they are pretty abusive, the wonkier the geometry the more abusive. The main difference being you are being paid £25k/year after 7 years of Uni instead of £100k.

Your example is not that far off, I know of a building where the subcontractor’s subcontractor substituted a less elastic steel and it caused bolts to fail with the potential to drop a few 100m out of the sky and land on the public below. I don’t know the details but the subcontractor could probably only have picked up the defect by hiring a metallurgist to spot check the bolts to verify that it was the right steel they had been supplied with and I’m guessing that wasn’t done.

More generally, what often happens with big projects like this is the design team is not connected with the contractors that build the job. The reason why this happens is because early in the design stage when you speak to a main contractor you don’t get to talk to the actual subcontractors that will build the thing, you are essentially speaking to the salesmen that will eventually get their buying guys to hire subcontractors to do the actual work. If they are brought on early then Contractors typically find ways to use proprietary lock in and cost ratcheting techniques to increase the cost of a build once they have secured the job so to avoid this a fairly common setup for a building of this size is for a design team to prepare drawings and a performance specification to a level of detail that gets you regulatory compliance, but not a full nuts and bolts design with buildability assessed. This is not just the architectural design but also the structures, M&E, security, landscape etc. So, for example, the electrical design might be a block diagram and the loads, but the bus bars might not be sized and the suppliers for all the switchgear wont be selected. At pinch points there may be a more detailed reference design.

At this point there will be a design build contract made between the contractor and the client based on the partially complete design. This design gets handed over to the contractor to complete and the contractor’s engineers take over and complete the details. Sometimes some of the original design team gets novated from the client to the contractor, quite often only the architects but you have to be really sharp in your negotiations if you do this because once they have you hooked there will be huge time and cost pressure to complete the designs for less fees and to find ways to save money.

A rule of thumb I use is that on a A1 sheet’s worth of information takes about 1 person week to complete when you include all the research. Often with consultations with other specialists this work will be stretched over a couple of months. On a big project there will be 10s of thousands of drawings in play. This can’t be rushed if you don’t want any mistakes, but it almost always is and if you are an engineer or an architect working for the contractor at this point there is huge pressure to cut corners. Non-famous architects and engineers are actually not very well paid compared to other professionals and we tend to work very long unpaid hours with workers rights laws regularly flouted, e.g. firing pregnant women etc.

Another issue is that there is corruption in the buying department of the main contractor as well, they have gold watches and get taken on days out to go and ‘bet on horse racing’ by the subcontractors.

So the contractor’s incentive to cut costs and corruption cause a lot of last minute design changes to use a ‘preferred supplier’ or to reduce complexity or use cheaper materials. When coupled with the time pressure, things go wrong.

Everyone will say, ‘oh you architects should design everything properly down to the last detail, there should be PLM models like the aircraft industry’ but the fact is every building is a prototype, a building this large has a much higher margin of safety but it is as complicated as an airliner and airliners cost a lot more money to develop than buildings. No-one is willing to pay for the time input, they would rather let the contractor bodge it on site, often contractors will end up using the reference designs and filling the details themselves on site, e.g. using drawings never intended to be construction information.

Another one is ‘well then you should use more standardisation’ from personal experience in trying to make my own business more profitable, you can try to standardise construction details but there are a lot of high level client influenced design decisions that ripple right through a building down to the 1:2 construction details so this only works up to a point. I’ve managed to break my details down into reusable components, but I’ve not managed to literally reuse the same drawings for multiple projects.

As we’ve seen with the 737 Max debacle the airline industry is not immune from these kind of mistakes, I think ultimately the problem is probably more with project management and construction contracting culture than it is with ‘the Architects are hand wavy artists’ (we’re mostly not)