College of Architecture

Glass curtain wall (CW) systems have been inevitable elements of commercial buildings for over a century. The systems mainly consist of mullion materials and glazing units that are selected and designed to achieve the desired structural, thermal and daylighting performances as well as to meet cost and aesthetic concerns. The health and environmental life cycle impacts of CW systems, however, are not usually considered in design.

The main objective of this paper is to study how change of mullion materials would affect the health and environmental impacts associated with a typical CW system over its life cycle. The mullion materials studied for the purpose of this paper include extruded aluminum, carbon steel and glulam timber. Also, the health and environmental impact categories of interest include global warming, acidification, eutrophication and human toxicity. To achieve the objective, a process-based cradle-to-gate attributional Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method was applied. Results indicate that CW system with glulam timber mullions causes the least and CW system with extruded aluminum mullions causes the most damage to the environment and human health over their life cycle. A CW system with carbon steel mullions falls in-between.

This paper proposes a method for answering the question,“What is the best Project Delivery System (PDS) disregarding context?” Its starting point is a critique of previous literature for failing to adequately consider organizational integration and managerial operating systems when defining project delivery systems. The proposed research method is statistical analysis of survey data, exploring the correlation between hypothesized characteristics of the 'ideal'PDS and outcomes.

Extensive research and published material exists addressing owner, contractor, and supplier relationships and contracting methods. Also, there exist a variety of capital project delivery systems in construction industry, which all aim at delivering projects to project owners with desired quality and within expected cost and schedule. These project delivery systems are predefined systems and processes each defined to address some of the many problems that keep owners of projects from achieving their desired results. Previous literature, however, indicates that the outcomes of applying these delivery processes are still disappointing to owners and not promising to a major part of the construction industry. The major objectives of this Construction Industry Institute (CII)-funded research were to identify an innovative approach to project delivery, challenge the industry and its customers to create conditions for ideal project delivery paradigm, and provide suggestions on how to approximate the ideal in imperfect conditions. The research objectives were attempted through a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods. A comprehensive review of existing literature in the field and creative thinking workshops were steps in the research to achieve the vision to the new ideal project delivery system and to develop the hypothesis. The hypothesis was then tested and validated through statistical analyses and case-study research. We concluded that superior project performance can be achieved by breaking existing paradigms and implementing organizational integration, alignment of interests, and management-by-means through new project delivery systems.

In the AEC industry, globally distributed teams are becoming more common, BIM adoption is increasing, and effective time management is essential for remaining competitive. Therefore, understanding how to maximize BIM for construction coordination using collaborative technologies becomes crucial. Observations from a 2012 industry case study with a five-member distributed team led this research team to hypothesize that importing a 3D model into a 3D virtual world would improve team collaboration with models because using cues in the 3D environment (including avatar position) affords more efficient communication and having independent viewpoints allows a greater number of coordination issues to be discovered. This paper reports on a collaborative experiment with four different universities in 2013, in which we observed six geographically distributed nine-member teams as they conducted work using two different communication technologies: A commercial collaboration platform in which team members view models via desktop sharing, and a 3D virtual world in which the students were able to "walk through" the building model. We found that the teams using the 3D software were able to communicate ideas more quickly and had significantly more discoveries. By contrast, the teams using desktop sharing software often required a detailed verbal explanation when communicating specific ideas.

Integration of disciplines and project participants is prescribed widely as a major remedy to improve effectiveness and efficiency of construction projects. In the context of sustainable high-performance (SHP) projects, integrated design (ID) approach encourages implementation of systems-thinking and early intense collaboration of project stakeholders during the design phase. The desired outcomes in this context would be buildings that not only are cost effective but also have superior energy and sustainability performance over their life cycle. The present paper reports on a research project that attempted to develop and validate a framework for evaluation of the ID teams of SHP projects. The research applied a mixed-method (qualitative–quantitative) research methodology. First, qualitative research (case study and interview) and literature review were used to create a pool of evaluation factors and items that could be used for evaluation/measurement of the performance of the ID teams. These items were generated and organized based on the context, input, process, and product (CIPP) evaluation model. Then, in quantitative phase of research, the evaluation items were tested for reliability and validity by deploying a cross-sectional questionnaire survey of LEED-rated projects and statistical analysis of the collected responses. The research finally proposed a validated framework for evaluation of the ID teams of SHP projects, which consisted of four major elements: an evaluation model based on the CIPP model, 27 evaluation factors, 65 evaluation items, and a measurement format.

Engineering teams collaborating in virtual environments face many technical, social and cultural challenges. In this paper we focus on distributed teams making joint unanticipated discoveries  in virtual environments. We operationalize Dossick and Neff’s definition of “Messy Talk” as a process in which teams mutually discover issues, critically engage in clarifying and finding solutions to the discovered issues, exchange their knowledge, and resolve the issue. Can globally distributed teams use “Messy Talk” via virtual communication technology?  We analyzed the interactions of four distributed student teams collaborating on a complex design and planning project using building information models (BIM) and the CyberGRID, a virtual world specifically developed for collaborative work. Their interactions exhibited all four elements of Messy Talk, even though resolution was the least common. Virtual worlds support real time joint problem solving by 1) providing affordances for talk mediated by shared visualizations, 2) supporting team perceptions of building information models that are mutable and 3) allowing transformations of those models while people were together in real time.  Our findings suggest that distributed team collaboration requires technologies that support Messy Talk--and iterative trial-and-error--for complex multidimensional problems.

ABSTRACT In this paper we present a healthcare case study that leveraged Integrated Project Delivery (IPD), Building Information Modeling (BIM) and lean construction (Lean). With this project, we aim to investigate organizational alignment and focus on how team building facilitated innovation in the design and construction processes and had significant positive impact on the operational efficiencies of the building. Through structured interviews, we found that a unique proposal process, which was focused on "building team chemistry and understanding", lead to the team's development of a culture of open communication and teamwork that set the ground work for designers and builders to work closely together, blending teams and blurring boundaries throughout the execution of design and construction. In this paper, we explore how "The IPD allowed the overlaps to occur in a productive way". In doing so, we build on previous finding that the antecedents of effective integration were the development of the team's orientation and culture as well as the processes of working together. The tools, IPD, lean and BIM, supported the integrated teamwork, but did not create the integrated team; however, the contract, lean and BIM tools did reinforce the project team's integration and facilitated better results in terms of design and construction products. In this paper, we focus on how the drive for efficiencies in construction and operations influenced design processes and outcomes, and how team alignment overcame technological and logistical challenges throughout their project process.

ABSTRACT In this paper we present a healthcare case study that leveraged Integrated Project Delivery (IPD), Building Information Modeling (BIM) and lean construction (Lean). With this project, we aim to investigate organizational alignment and focus on how team building facilitated innovation in the design and construction processes and had significant positive impact on the operational efficiencies of the building. Through structured interviews, we found that a unique proposal process, which was focused on "building team chemistry and understanding", lead to the team's development of a culture of open communication and teamwork that set the ground work for designers and builders to work closely together, blending teams and blurring boundaries throughout the execution of design and construction. In this paper, we explore how "The IPD allowed the overlaps to occur in a productive way". In doing so, we build on previous finding that the antecedents of effective integration were the development of the team's orientation and culture as well as the processes of working together. The tools, IPD, lean and BIM, supported the integrated teamwork, but did not create the integrated team; however, the contract, lean and BIM tools did reinforce the project team's integration and facilitated better results in terms of design and construction products. In this paper, we focus on how the drive for efficiencies in construction and operations influenced design processes and outcomes, and how team alignment overcame technological and logistical challenges throughout their project process.