13 Setting up a design management construction organization for a 16 million building
The craftspeople’s free participation and contribution to an emerging whole must be allowed during the earliest stages of design and during heavy construction, when big issues are decided as much as during later stages of design, and during finishing.
Most often, large-volume 20th-century organization of construction work created efficiency by assigning rule-based tasks to categories, and imposing the categories, regardless of the reality which occurs.
Instead, to carry out the living process successfully in a larger project, it needs acceptance, from the beginning, that design, engineering, cost control, construction, direct management of subcontractors and communication between architect and craftspeople directly, will all be encourages and supported as part of a single multifaceted operation of interacting processes.
To grasp the nature of such a new construction management process, let us imagine 50,000 decisions being made during the course of building the Museum or other large public building. The decisions and actions were to evolve over a three-year period, from the time the project is first conceived to the time the Museum was first to be occupied. The total process would require about 50 decisions per day, daily, for 1,000 days.
To be consistent with the living process, and specifically also with the continual repetition of the fundamental process as the living process was carried out, all these decisions have to work in an atmosphere of concern for living, flexible detail, carried out within a vision of an emerging whole — and this conception must be shared by the two hundred men and women doing the work, and by the managing architect and the top construction managers and engineers who are supervising and carrying out the work.
Construction workers are organized in a decentralized fashion, so that each construction worker has some freedom to contribute to the formation of the whole. Of course, what is done in any part of the structure has to work within the budget, and it has to be consistent with the larger plan; nevertheless, there is freedom, locally, within the building, to make each room and part unique, and for each team of construction workers to give the process something that they love and enjoy.
All the architect-managers are personally involved in the making of at least some of the ornaments and details. And at least half of the construction workers on the job have enough responsibility, and freedom, so that their individual mark is left on the building — in the form of initials, or stamped marks, or signature.
The shared motive, maintained throughout, and communicated to all who worked on the building, is that the public space which the building creates, is going to be considered as important in the process as the building itself.
#book/The Nature of Order/3 A Vision of a Living World/4 Large public buildings#