PART FIVE - cutting COSTS BY 30% - MADE TO MEASURE OR OFF-THE-PEG?

'In this country we keep on trying to reinvent the wheel. We were in for a big hospital with lots of doors - 1,200 in fact - and the architect wanted to tweak each one for a whole variety of reasons. My solution to a major dilemma was to take him to the door factory where it was clear that standard doors were produced mechanically while specials all had to be made by hand.'

The experience related above by Tom Barton, southern director, Mowlem Construction, is probably all too familiar to most people in the industry. The attitude to design in the UK has traditionally been for 'one-off' artistic statements that can be vastly over-specified for what the occupants actually need. Standardisation is frowned upon as the start of the slippery slope to dull, uniform buildings.

The construction process itself has not escaped from the dead hand of UK tradition either. Contractors have tended to avoid prefabrication and geared themselves towards labour intensive trades all working in-situ. Other countries have adopted a very different approach.

The United States and many other European countries tend to prefabricate more of their buildings, have less high specifications and rely far more on standard components. This can lead to spectacular savings in the cost of construction as BAA's property arm, Lynton, found out when it made a comparative study between UK and US building costs in 1993.

The study, which has now become something of an industry benchmark, used as an example the British Airways Centre for Combined Operations at Heathrow. The aim was to find out what it would cost to build the same building in North Carolina using three different approaches.

The costs were found to be the same when the UK drawings and specifications were used. Savings of 8% were gained when US norms and standards were used in combination with the UK's aesthetic and performance criteria. However, savings of 32% were achieved when the performance and aesthetic criteria were adjusted to reflect typical US client requirements and tenant expectations.

The massive difference in costs are attributable to a number of factors. Principal among them are lower US performance specifications, especially for the M&E installations and greater use of standard components in virtually all aspects of design.

The benefits of such cost savings are obvious, so why do we keep on inventing the wheel in the UK? Clearly it is a question of culture and getting a culture to change is a long slow process. But, as we show here, there are strong signs that sections of the industry are beginning to tackle the problem and look at increasing standardisation, reducing specification levels and using more prefabricated elements.