News

As many of us learn every New Year, bingeing and too-strict diets are the equally out-of-control flip sides of the same problem. Eat and drink too much, then react to this state of affairs with an impossibly spare regimen out of the latest fad diet. One leads to the other—we learn the hard way—and sensible moderation gets lost in shuffling between one extreme and its opposite.

A similar shuttling between bipolar forces is to be found in the world of building and urban development. This is driven by two ideas from the field of construction management that every year shape more and more of our buildings and city-building. These concepts are seldom discussed by the general public, but all of us live with their consequences in the form of bland buildings or heinous construction cost over-runs.

The South Beach Diet of the construction world is something called "value engineering (VE)," a construction management technique applied early in the design process, where architectural decisions about the form, layout and embellishment of proposed buildings are interrogated by sharp-pencilled cost consultants. Value engineering is the triumph of accounting and un-imaginative management over architecture and public-mindedness: it values mediocrity and a tilt to the measurable over the meaningful.

Few realize that architectural designs are so subject to the scrutiny of accountants and cost surveyors—the real power has shifted there. It is said that the only difference between 'starchitects' and their more humble peers is that they are less subject to value engineering's bottom line scrutiny (and lord knows, brand name designers are often the ones more deserving of a tough grilling than their more anonymous colleagues.)

The other urban development extreme—and responsible for more cost overruns than all the aesthetic fantasies of our designers—is the deadly accretion of needless building functions and spaces known as "scope creep." This where a simple meal of a building gets bloated with appetizers, desserts and rich sauces, none of them intended to be ordered when setting down to the table. Scope creep has two expressions: a simple aggrandizement of the size and complexity of proposed spaces; but also a lack of initial focus on the true needs and market for a building, and a resulting tilt to the superfluous, the extravagant, and the outright elephantine.

In the world of housing developments, scope creep means a constant and unwarranted shift towards luxury housing. Luxury condos provide developers with their highest profit ratios, but an obsession with this end of the market means that affordability is too often shunted aside needlessly. Interior finishes migrate to ever-higher standards, countertops are shaped solely of fine stone, and high end appliance packages replace more modest ones. When buying condos, not many of us realize that including these high end features in our mortgages means with interest, we pay double or more for these frills than if we had purchased them outright. Few of us are given a real choice in this—just a pick from the proferred range of luxury and super-luxury interior packages—and diminishing affordability is one consequence.

Commercial constructions and especially public sector buildings are subject to a different form of scope creep. This is where buildings are foolishly conceived in the first place, or foolishly enlarged while their designs are being fine-tuned. Our definitive local example of this is Vancouver's huge new trade and convention centre expansion. The convention centre's siting (do we really need waterfront views for sealed room after sealed room filled with people watching PowerPoints?), urban design (what happened to views of the water along Thurlow and other streets?), and entire mandate (the continent was littered with under-used, money-losing convention centres even before 9-11 and the tightening of cross-border travel) can all be questioned. Rather than being fine-tuned to fit our city and a changing market, our trade and convention centre just got bigger and bigger, with more and more features, ultimately $400 million more, a near doubling of its original budget.

The very real rise of construction costs recently has been the easy out when officials explain this squandering of public dollars, but I am sure much more of this run-up is due to scope creep than it is the mounting price of steel or construction workers' wages. The new convention centre was also subject to value engineering in a failed attempt to rein in costs (understanding, again, that the doubled budget came mainly from scope creep.)

For example, early on it was hoped that Vancouver's long-planned waterfront theatre could be accommodated there, and as well, that the multi-acre and very expensive 'green roof' would be a welcome public benefit, because Vancouverites were to be granted access to portions of it, and to the grand harbour views this huge rooftop provides. The green roof will now be but a plot of green visible from surrounding towers.

With value engineering, both theatre and public green roof got cut, as did much of its architectural character. It was designed by Seattle's LMN Architects in association with Vancouver's Musson Cattell Mackey Partnership. LMN served as associates on the design and construction of Rem Koolhaas' globally-praised Seattle Public Library, a bold vision of zig-zagging floors, open stacks of books, and a truly transparent and public-friendly building. Wags in Vancouver's architectural community describe our trade and convention centre expansion as looking like the Styrofoam packing that filled the box that Koolhaas's ultra-cool new library came shipped in.

Simultaneous diets and binges are silly, and I hope the weak architecture, bad urban design, and out-of-control costs of our trade and convention centre expansion serve some long term purpose in being used as examples of how common sense, well-designed buildings get sacrificed to our new gods of scope creep and value engineering. Good architecture, urban development and city planning seldom need either of these construction management fads.