Building blocks: Ivar Krasinski

Gerhard Hope , May 3rd, 2009

Burt, Hill principle Ivar Krasinski speaks to MEP Middle East about integrating the building blocks of the build process, from design to final commissioning. As an architect, he gives a unique perspective on the design challenges faced by MEP professionals.

Krasinski argues that, from an integrated design scenario, “the MEP guys should be involved in that process very early. We should have the energy modelling done from the very earliest phase, even before the building shape or intention has been decided upon. All of these things require the involvement of MEP engineers, because they are the ones who can run the energy models for us and help us interpret the data.

“As designers, we can do some of that, but an MEP engineer will have the extra expertise to really make the most of that process. So it is very important to bring in MEP at the very beginning, absolutely. And especially now, if you think about the potential energy savings on building orientation being in the order of 30%, those kinds of energy models should happen long before the client even sees what the building might look like.”

Krasinski explains that, in the past, energy modelling was performed long after the client had already seen the concept, when it had been designed and was already in a developmental stage, “where the cost of making changes was already far too high to make any significant impact.” At this stage if it emerges that the design is not LEED compliant, the only way to deal with the problem “is to add pieces to the building – either hardware, or strange devices to the skin.

Adds to the cost

“All this adds extra cost, and that is where the perception comes from that green design is going to be expensive, because the right decisions were not made from the start. This you end up making a whole bunch of remedial decisions halfway through the design, and that is really what we need to change. Once people embrace the idea of an integrated design process, you are going to find that will not cost more, as per the conventional wisdom. But it is going to take some time for the various disciplines to really recognise this, and that is going to take some work.

“But we are happy to knock a few heads together to make that come true. The idea is that we start very early with the energy modelling, and work with the MEP guys right from the start. In this way we give the client much better value, and end up with a much more rigorous design process as well,” says Krasinski. Hence Burt, Hill has energy modellers and mechanical engineers “really working together with us right from the start.”

As to whether or not this is happening across the board in the industry, Krasinski is philosophical: “You could always use more of that. And what needs to happen within the design firms is that we must spend more time during the conceptual phase to allow for that interaction to happen. That means that when we are writing out proposals, we have to distribute the fees slightly differently to allow all professionals to come together at an early phase before the architect decides what this building has to be.

“And that means the business model has to change in some ways, because by changing the fee distribution, the proposals and contracts change, the way the schedules are organised change, and the cash flow changes, and these are all things that need to be considered. On the other hand, from the client point of view, they should embrace it, because by spending that bit extra at the concept phase, they will realise significant savings later on – and there is no arguing about this point,” says Krasinski.

Impact on design

Commenting on the impact of the current economic climate on the design sector, he says: “At the end of the day, in terms of the cost of any project, the least expensive part is the design. While we recognise that everyone is going to have to deal with lower margins in terms of design fees, it is most beneficial to the client to spend that time on the design upfront, so they can leverage all those greater costs that occur during construction and the actual operation of the project. If you compare design to the rest of it, that is really where you can save money. So a little bit more spent upfront, regardless of the financial situation, is always going to be a better deal than doing it later.”

Krasinski says there is a well-known curve in terms of skyrocketing costs related to design changes. “In the concept phase, the cost of any changes is pretty much zero, so your curve is horizontal. Then when you get into the schematic, it starts to become steeper. By the time you get into design, development and actual construction documents, it becomes really tall, so that by the time you are doing changes during the construction phase – which clients in the UAE were pretty much fond of doing – those costs became astronomical.”

The solution is simple, says Krasinski. “In a time where you have a need to constrain expenditure and to really control the cost benefits, the time spent at the early design stage needs to be focused on.” This involves a paradigm shift for clients. “Clients used to come to a site, look at the constructed condition of a project, and say: ‘I do not like this; change it.’ In the past that was something that people would just have gone ahead and done. I think that now the clients themselves will think twice before doing that. This is not something that designers will decide upon. The clients will just say it is okay the way it is, and let us think about it earlier next time.”

Krasinski remarks that Burt, Hill has always been technologically astute, having embraced Building Information Modelling (BIM) three years ago already. “Our aim is to introduce optimisation basically from the infrastructure master planning phase all the way through to the actual specifying. We achieve this with an iterative process that improves the building performance continually with every cycle. Optimisation in terms of financial feasibility is definitely something we can leverage more in this climate, but I would maintain it is really the right thing to do all along.

Shortening the loop

“The idea of shortening the feedback loop of design and then being able to run through more iterations, and being able to check more variables, so as to give the client the best possible solution, is something that was pretty much the right thing to do no matter how high the margins were. Now that we are starting to enter into a period of significantly lower margins for both designers and developers, and all the sub-consultants, it is even more important to use those kinds of processes,” says Krasinski.

Such an approach is very topical now in terms of cost-cutting, but it was a totally different environment back then. “It was a more exuberant and experimental environment, and a lot more carte blanche was given. Things were not as necessarily set in stone, so we had very open briefs for projects. Clients were actually encouraging our architects to expand beyond the brief, which was an interesting behaviour – financially more risky, but it gave us an opportunity to test some new ideas,” says Krasinski. He adds that this is the major difference between the UAE and US markets, for example.

“In the US, clients always have very exact project briefs tied in intimately with financial feasibility projections, and an architect would change those at his or her peril, whereas here we are actually encouraged to do that. I think what you will find now is that, as the economic environment is changing, clients are opting more for the US approach. This means doing the financial feasibility very rigorously upfront, deriving exact figures from that, and only then proceeding with the design. So that is a major sea change we anticipate in the next few years,” says Krasinski.



In terms of green building regulations being introduced by the Dubai government, Krasinski points out that: “The impression that Dubai has not taken sustainability seriously until now is not accurate. Many people have been doing sustainable design for over 20 years. Burt, Hill as a firm has been a leader in sustainable design since the 1970s actually. When I joined Burt, Hill in 2005 and began working on the Auto Mall, no one asked me to do this. I just had the ability to work with passive solar design, day lighting and low water use landscaping, which were concepts pretty much designed into the project right from the beginning, because it was a basic tenet and a core value of our practice.”

However, Krasinski says that what has changed in the interim is “that now clients are more willing to discuss it. In the past, if you were doing something sustainable, you in a way almost did not mention it to the client because you were afraid they would cost it, as they were often of the impression that sustainable design was somehow a more upfront cost. Now they are more willing to listen to that sort of thing, so it gives us more leverage to be able to achieve what we always wanted to achieve. In that sense, the decree has been very helpful for design professionals.”

Ivar Krasinski

Ivar Krasinski joined Burt Hill in 2005, and has been a design leader in the Dubai office since his first project. As a principal, he is responsible for leading teams in the investigation, execution, and refinement of architectural concepts on many notable projects. Also a leader in the architectural community, Krasinski is a founding member of the Architectural Association of the UAE (similar to the American Institute of Architects), and is the initiator of the aaUAE’s Urban Design Forum, where he has moderated a series of discussions on urban design, with panels including internationally-renowned architects, planners and developers. Krasinski believes in a design approach that exemplifies rigorous, sustainable, and kinesthetic elements.