We have been honored with another award for our groundbreaking IPD project: the Autodesk AEC Headquarters in Waltham, MA. The project has been selected as a Green Building of America Award winning project.

Here is the official press release from Construction Communications:

“From more than 2,500 nominated projects, Autodesk AEC Headquarters (submitted by KlingStubbins) has been selected as a Green Building of America Award-winning project and will be featured in the upcoming special Real Estate & Construction Review-Northeast Green Success Stories edition. Each Green Building of America Success Story project is highlighted in a case study that intertwines the words of the project’s owner/developer, consultants, architects and contractors to explain how the teams worked together to design and build one of the region’s most important, innovative or unique new or renovated sustainable facilities.

Regional editions, both in print and online, provide inside information about the most referred and qualified firms, team members and products that are being utilized for the most important sustainable projects within a specific area of the country. Combined with in-depth case studies, “how-to” editorial from leading consultants and glossy top-notch photography, each edition is packed with all the essentials and is therefore a “must read” for any owner, architect, general contractor, consultant or project team member thinking about building green.

The Real Estate & Construction Review has been published by Construction Communications since 1999. Each edition is published annually and features the region’s top projects as determined by our editorial board. The publication is read and referenced by leaders within the region’s local governments, economic development groups, financial institutions, owners, architects and contractors. Each edition will also be available in flip book format online at www.constructionreviews.com. The website, accessed by industry leaders and decision makers throughout the country, combines more than 30,000 links and millions of searches each year. There will be five regional 2009-2010 Green Success Story editions of the Real Estate & Construction Review including Northeast, Southeast, Northwest, Southwest and Midwest.”

We wanted to take a minute amid the Thanksgiving-Day-Eve hustle and bustle to stop and simply state how grateful we are for so many things this year:

• We are thankful for our projects, large and small, each one is of the utmost importantance to us.
• We are thankful for our employees, you are the soul of this company.
• We are thankful for our clients, partners and other team members, together we build the future.
• We are thankful and honored that our work has been so praised this year.
• We are thankful for the technology that is revolutionizing the building industry.
• We are thankful that we have food in our bellies and love in our families.
• And last but not least, we are thankful for The Cosby Show for showing us how to carve a turkey properly.

Have a safe and happy holiday!

On Friday Tocci’s  Director of Virtual Design and Construction, Laura Handler, posted an interesting article on her blog giving her thoughts on a NY Times blog post regarding construction. We thought it was worth re-posting, so without further ado…

“One of the many non-BIM blogs that I read/skim is “You’re the Boss“, a NY Times blog about running a small business. Specifically, the author, Bruce Buschel, is starting a restaurant, which I have found fascinating.

Yesterday, he wrote a post about the progress of construction on his new restaurant and had a few interesting things to say, which I think reflect the state of our industry. The overall theme of his post is truly about planning and expresses the need for the transformation we are working to make, through VDC. A few great quotes:

“…So the plumber is at work, playing Twister with the HVAC guy as the electricians dance around the carpenters…”

“…There are drawings upon drawings, and then changes upon changes upon those drawings. Everywhere you look, rubber bands contain the drawings, 24 inches by 35 inches, rolled up like parchment-paper communiqués between Jefferson and Adams…”

Buschel is impressed with the ability of architects to visualize and understand design using 2D plans, because he has no ability to do so – like so many other people in the industry. Only as he stands in the partially completed space, he starts to see “this materialization of a thousand decisions made so long ago in the abstract”.

I think this is a struggle for so many, who cannot visualize the end space. Once they finally see it,

I would have loved to show Buschel a BIM of his project, sometime during design. As a contractor, we suffer from indecision, late decision, or change of mind. All three are costly and time-consuming, and as Buschel points out, test the paitence of the team. We don’t like to see owners struggle to make decisions, and honestly, much of the indecision comes from lack of information. What do the options look like? Cost? What is their impact of schedule?

VDC clearly cannot solve all of these issues, but can help good teams extract and position information to move forward with design and construction.”

As the name suggests, this is a milestone issue. With all components “signed, sealed and delivered”, Autodesk’s AEC headquarters has received LEED Platinum certification. We are using this issue to share the final results of this historic project, and give you a “nuts and bolts” understanding of how an Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) project is completed.

Topics covered include:
The full USGBC scorecard to share details of the LEED Platinum Certification
The results of the Final Judgment which explains the IPD risk/reward dynamic
The metrics of the project

Enjoy!

Click here for the full issue

A few Tocci employees recently listened to a discussion on WBUR, the Boston area NPR station, about the role of architecture in our society. The program was an interview with Paul Goldberger, Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic, and Sky Line columnist for The New Yorker, to talk about his latest book: “Why Architecture Matters.”

Mr. Goldberger described how architecture creates cultural memories for a society. Buildings play key roles in our lives and history just as literature and movies do. Architecture is the greatest memory of an era, we can as easily define the early 20^th century with Frank Lloyd Wright as we can with Picasso. We as a society have common cultural memories of famous structures like Pyramids or the Lincoln Memorial.

The CCTV Tower in Beijing. An Example of the incredible architecture we are capable of today. Image from MoMa.

We also all have strong personal memories of buildings; our childhood homes, our college campuses, our first office buildings. Mr. Goldberger said that his one concern about architecture today and of the past 30 years or so is that we have not produced good ordinary buildings. We are building more fantastic important buildings, but the Costco down the road from your house might not have been designed and built in a caring way.

We are all influenced by personal buildings, like our first apartments.

This opinion was echoed by the next guest on the program: Richard Meier, world renowned architect.  Mr. Meier spoke very degradingly about the ordinary buildings in our lives, saying that big box retail buildings or multi-unit housing structures don’t have real architects and are designed by builders and developers who (to paraphrase slightly) don’t really care about what they are building.

We at Tocci were saddened at these words. Realizing that the old perceptions of builders as the caveman counterparts to architects still holds true. We still have a lot of work to do in the AECO industry to reverse the damage of the last several decades, in which productivity and quality has gone down and litigation has gone up.

We can’t speak for other builders but at Tocci we feel that it is a fundamental part of our job to embrace, ‘own’ and appreciate the design of our buildings as much our architect partners. We consider ourselves enablers of great design. We have a bit of an addiction to great design of all kinds (thus our Design We Love page and blog posts), but hyperbole aside, we could not agree with Mr. Goldberger more: great architecture is so culturally significant in our societies and buildings are so much more than mere shelter from rain, we feel lucky to be a part of why architecture matters.