07/28/2010
By Barbara White Bryson and Canan Yetmen
It is no secret that the design and construction industry is one of the most inefficient on the planet. A number of books have identified and documented the declining productivity of every hour and dollar invested in the building process. Architects, engineers, contractors and developers have been struggling for years in an environment so fragmented, no single player can have significant influence or initiate meaningful change. Architects are marginalized and commoditized, and contractors struggle with the same labor and process risk they have carried for centuries. Critical design information is withheld until the submittal process. No viable and practical risk management instrument has been developed. Buildings are still created one brick, one nail and one shim at a time, and the value proposition to owners continues to decline.
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The Design Intelligence bookstore is taking advance orders for The Owner’s Dilemma, which will be out in August! The book highlights the role of owners and clients in remaking the building industry and features case studies that illustrate the real-world innovative practices of architects working with a variety of building types and clients. My co-author is Barbara White Bryson, associate vice president for facilities engineering and planning at Rice University, who recently spoke on this topic at the AIA convention in Miami. And here’s what Michael Graves had to say about the book:

“The Owner’s Dilemma asks us to understand that two things are crucial. First, that each of its five elements is considered individually and given equal weight and second, that the five elements are considered collectively and this collective thinking must be maintained throughout the entire project. If the individual keys are managed well, the collective group will clearly be successful.”