Back to the Drawing Board: Project redesigns

After changes to its design – for aesthetics and budget concerns – the city has finally settled on a plan for the former Lester E. Cox Building on East Tampa Street.

Project architects Creative Ink Architects LLC and Buxton-Kubik-Dodd Inc. had to redesign the crime lab when city leaders were unhappy with the overall look of the structure. A second round of changes needed to cut costs.

“A great deal of the changes were due to the fact that what we thought would fit into our budget just didn’t,” said Phil Broyles, head of operations for Springfield Public Works.

Changes were made in window design, he added, noting that the final plan includes windows that, while larger than those currently in the building, are smaller than in the original design.

Those changes – along with changes in floor, wall and ceiling finishes and the elimination of redundancies in the building’s heating, ventilation and air conditioning system – reduced the cost from $7.5 million to about $5.5 million.

While the crime lab required extensive changes, more subtle design changes are not uncommon.

Missouri State University, for example, broke ground in December on its JQH Arena after significant design changes were made due to cost overruns. JQH Arena’s project budget increased to $67 million from $60 million, despite the revised arena’s seating shrinking to 11,000 from 12,000.

The cost would have increased to $75 million had the number of seats not been cut.

The design team for the arena is led by Kansas City-based architecture firm Ellerbe Becket and includes Pellham Phillips Architects and Engineers Inc.

Time to change?

Jerry Hagerman, founder of Hagerman New Urbanism, said that major redesigns late in a project don’t happen very often. But when redesign is necessary, it usually can be traced back to one of three reasons: alterations in the philosophy of the client, in leadership of the client company or adjustments in funding.

“If the resources change, the project changes. If the scope of the work based on need changes, the project changes,” Hagerman said.

“Also, most projects today don’t have a single personality – you’ve got a board of directors making the decisions. Sometimes there will be a change of the guard, and the new people coming in have a different way of looking at the project,” he added.

The experiences of Randy Russell, president of Lohmeyer-Russell Architects PC, indicate that money is the driving force for design changes.

“Every project – whether it’s a retail shopping center or an office building or a not-for-profit group – has a budget,” Russell said. “Each project type may have a budget for different reasons, but everyone has a budget.”

That’s where value engineering – the process of determining which elements are absolutely essential to a building’s function – begins.

“Value engineering typically represents a project that is (less than) 5 percent over budget, whereas redesign tends to be 20 (percent) or 30 percent,” said Alan Bates, principal of Bates & Associates Inc.

Hagerman said his firm also practices value engineering, balancing the scope of work with available funds. He pointed to recent rises in the cost of building materials such as steel and concrete as one reason that bids have been harder to predict – and a possible reason why projects may come in over budget and require minor redesign work.

Bates agreed that the bidding market is volatile but said if architects and engineers do their homework, they should be able to estimate approximately what the cost will be and avoid major redesigns.

“It’s unreasonable to expect an architect or engineer to be exactly accurate, because things change in the bidding climate on a weekly basis,” Bates said. “But there is little excuse to be more than 25 percent over budget.”[[In-content Ad]]