INFLUENCING THE BUILDABILITY OF THE DESIGN

Areas where improvements at the design stage can do most to aid buildability are cladding, re-entry corners and the thickness of the cladding panels.

Of these, cladding design offers by far the biggest saving. Bovis's Randall makes a special plea for cladding sub-contractors to have an earlier say. 'Often, cladding sub-contractors can't use the architect's information and they end up duplicating the architect's work.'

But there are objections to adapting the basic procurement method to ensure better buildability. Julian Vickery, of developer Greycoat, is one who doubts the wisdom of making such changes. 'Contractors have made a lot of the buildability issue in order to argue that they should be involved sooner but this, for the client, is a very expensive way of buying ideas,' he said.

'For the extra lump sum the client ends up paying, it would have been much cheaper to have hired more designers.'

Peter Rogers, director of Stanhope Properties, reckons buildability is 'just another of those buzz words. People have plugged into the word buildability to make money out of it.'

There may be some truth in what Rogers says but many clients are still hit by the costly reality of unbuildability in that the final bills they have to pay bear little relation to what was originally budgeted for.

Griffiths believes that there is great potential for making savings through better buildability, especially in smaller jobs. 'Clients complain that smaller jobs get passed to the practice's young architect. After a seven-year training period, you'd think someone would have drummed it into such fleglings that "thou shalt not re-invent the wheel".'