Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
occupancy, lighting, equipment, refl ected ceiling plans, fi re-rated walls and partitions,
and the characteristics of walls and glasses. At the same time, design engineers have
to provide feedbacks to the architect which based on this data the architect would be
able to complete his design. Samples of this data are duct and pipe chase requirement,
mechanical, electrical, plumbing and fi re protection space requirement, etc. Based
on the quality and effectiveness of the architect and engineers this information
exchange could take place either quickly or consumes some considerable time. In
some unfortunate situations, when one or more of the involved parties are not well
experienced, building design could be performed without complete and accurate
exchange of some important information. This most likely would lead to a problem-
atic and troublesome construction process.
After all the coordinations took place and was included in the building design,
the fi nal design product will be presented to the code reviewers and authorities
having jurisdiction for their approval before being handed to the general contractor
for construction. General contractor is usually selected through a competitive
bidding process.
The selected general contractor then hires different subcontractors to con-
struct different parts of the building. One more time a very close communication
among the architect, engineers, general and subcontractors is needed to make
delivering a successful fi nal product to the owner possible. As the general con-
tractor and his subcontractors become involved in the construction process, their
fi rst task is to provide construction shop drawings. These shop drawings are pro-
duced based on the information available in the construction documents, and
later will be used for constructing the actual building. Shop drawings are a set of
coordinated drawings that contractors provide from over laying all the architec-
tural and engineering drawings at each building part. Contractors send these shop
drawings along with selected equipment data back to the design team for their
fi nal review and approval of its exact equivalency with the design intents, and
after receiving an approval from the design team use it to start the actual con-
struction phase. During the construction process, design team in pre-approved
time intervals performs a few site visits, and informs the general contractor if
there is any construction deviation from the design contract documents. When
construction fi nishes the design team performs the fi nal site visit and approves
the building for occupancy. Again at this stage and based on the quality and accu-
racy of the contractors and design team site visit performances, construction pro-
cess could be completed either smoothly with a high quality, or poorly with
unchecked and uncorrected mistakes.
Architects and engineers usually prefer this method of design and construction
because they get to perform a design with much higher than what is set as the mini-
mum quality required by the codes and standards. After contractors got the project
based on becoming the lowest bidder, they may rely on collecting more money
through issuing request for information (RFI). This would require a successful dem-
onstration that design has not been clear and complete when they bid the project,
and they have calculated their estimated cost based on uncompleted design
document.
