Design for Construction

By Konstantinos Voulpiotis

If you’re reading this and you are a young professional, you may feel the pain that, after graduating from a brilliant architecture or engineering faculty, your wonderful concepts, ideas and daring designs crumble before your eyes in the realisation of the real world constraints. If you’re a student, you may have experienced the above in your work placement or heard stories by your professors. Go out there to build your Basil Spence Project worldshaking idea and good luck breaking through the walls of budget, design codes, durability, warranties and many more. Above all, good luck finding a contractor willing to take the risk to build the crazy idea you threw on the table late at night in your studio or home or the computer room of the inspiring-to-work-in CB.

Don’t worry, the world is not as bad as I just introduced it. I’m currently working in an environment where engineers, fabricators and builders are all in the same premises. Therefore the crazy idea thrown here is immediately filtered by the team who will fabricate the components and will actually go out there to build it. The idea is taken to the workshop, mockups are fabricated and tested and feedback is used to develop that initial idea. And this two way process enables amazing results: you end up with complete solutions; elegant, carefully detailed, expertly crafted projects.

Guess what: you just took down the biggest communication barrier, that one between the design and construction teams. I will argue that the architect – engineer communication barrier which we have all been used to in Bath, is easier to overcome! Now try to imagine what happens if you really unleash your imagination while having the entire team in symphony. What if, for example, you want to make a curve out of straight pieces, so you take thin pieces of wood, the simplest raw building material in the timber industry, and stagger them along your curve? And what if you want to span your creation a rather long distance and you add a post and two cables to create the simplest truss? Boom!

What if you want to construct a building with many leaning columns, each at a different angle, without having to fabricate bespoke connections for each column? Maybe you can sit down with the fabricating gang and discuss possible, complete solutions. How about a two-way rotating node which you can use for every angle?

What if you combine all the above with some high tech software and machinery that can cut your wood in precise shapes to fit a complex jigsaw puzzle? You make large Lego pieces, then you can create structures that were previously only in the sphere of imagination for the timber fans. And you can do it fast.

The above scenarios are certainly not the same as the (rather unique) challenges posed by the ACE faculty. However the principles remain: collaboration. Sit down in person with your other disciplines and resolve the design and construction issues over a blank piece of paper. Get creative, all together, drop the egos and have this common goal, a vision you want to achieve. The results will flabbergast you.

Konstantinos finished his MEng Civil Engineering degree in Bath in 2015 and moved to Vancouver, Canada, where he works for StructureCraft Builders. All photographic material is ©StructureCraft Builders Inc.