TABLE OF CONTENTS This is a book about designing and delivering high-performance projects. Since most of the money in a project s life is spent in the construction and operations phases, those phases merit entire books on their own. For an integrated design process, the construction period is where the rubber meets the road, a time when all of your grand intentions and careful design ideas have to be realized in the messy process of getting a building from a set of drawings and a hole in the ground to a finished project in which people can live, work, study, or play for decades to come.
I have found it useful on LEED projects to make sure that the construction process starts with a full explanation of the LEED goals and specifically which LEED credits the construction team is charged with achieving. If the construction documents were prepared properly, all of these requirements should have been in the General Conditions, Division 1 specifications. However, it s not generally the case that everyone reads all the specifications. That s why actively managing the construction process in high-performance projects is critical to achieving the desired results. The construction kickoff meeting is the place where all this starts, and a good general contractor will use a portion of that meeting to bring the LEED goals to the attention of the entire team.
John Pfeifer is senior vice president at McGough Construction in Minneapolis. His team recently completed (April 2008) an expected LEED Platinum project, a high-rise headquarters building...
