All homes, including apartments, townhomes, and single-family residences, are complex structures. Modern homes, built to current codes and standards, aim to deliver high levels of performance and control to occupants. Achieving these goals for residential buildings requires a significant amount of planning, decision making, and design.
One of the earliest stages in the process of building or retrofitting a home is the design phase. While traditional images of visionary architects carefully laying out each component of a house still persist among consumers, the reality is that the design phase is often a compartmentalized process that involves a substantial number of design professionals and contractors.
At the end of the day, then, who actually designs a house?
It can be argued that anyone who is given the authority, either directly or indirectly, to make decisions around the types of products and materials along with the overall assemblies that go into a house, is performing a design task. Let's use three examples to see what can be learned from this concept.
1. Architectural Layout: This one is fairly consistent in the industry - a variety of architectural design professionals are involved with laying out rooms, form, and dimensions. These designs have varying levels of input from clients based on the type of home being designed, but the iterative process is commonly executed by a professional with experience in best practices and architectural principles.
2. Structure: The factors that influence structural design, including structural engineering principles and code requirements, typically dictate the design process for most residential structures. Builders that choose to hire a structural engineer to oversee the entire structural design (and pay for it) typically end up with detailed structural designs that leave little ambiguity. Minimizing engineering fees, on the other hand, opens the door to incomplete details, such as fastening patterns or other connections. When a structural detail is not designed by a structural engineer, the individual that determines the final design, such as a framing contractor or even a code official, becomes the designer. This doesn't necessarily mean that the project is guaranteed to have structural issues, but it does introduce uncertainty and risk.
3. Building Enclosure: Modern residential structures rely on a well-designed building enclosure to ensure code compliance, performance, and durability. This is a part of the home, though, that isn't always properly or completely designed. Air sealing, flashing, and insulation details are often described on construction drawings through incomplete or vague details. Ambiguity in the building enclosure often puts the authority in the hands of the contractor executing the detail. Good crews and contractors know how to handle this, but consistency can be a challenge. In order to reduce risk and achieve consistent performance and durability, details – ideally, construction standards – need to be designed by someone who has a thorough understanding of building science principles.
What can we take away from these examples of design in homebuilding? Success is often in the details. Builders that trust their subcontractors to execute may elect to reduce the specificity of their construction details and ultimately limit the amount of up-front design that takes place. Without that assurance, though, any vague details in homebuilding will risk putting someone in charge of design that might not have the qualifications to deliver a high-performing, durable home.
Comments