How far we have come.  Gone are the days where you could sit on your front porch and greet your neighbors as the walked by.  Now folks pull into their three car garages, shut the door and retreat to the back deck.  Away from the world and your neighbors.

Now here come the “planners” and sociologists and all the other so called educated folks with a new and brilliant idea.  Let’s build new ”towns” that recreate times of yore.   Places where you can live, shop, eat and work with out having to commute.  A place where you can really know your neighbors.  A good idea?  From a concept point, yes.  From a practical point, no.  Here, where I live there are several examples of this.  None have even scratched the surface of what a small town should feel like.  They have created multi story buildings with shops on the street levels,  business’s on the second floors and apartments on the upper floors.  This hardly embodies the friendliness so desperately needed.  Patrons park in the multi story parking garage and enter their apartments never to be seen again until they start the new day.  There is no place to sit and interact with others.  Yes you can eat in the restaurants, but with so many “non residents” already there how do you know who your neighbor is.  Where is the housing that sits adjacent to the business?  Where are the front porches?  Where are the churches that are so desperately needed?  You see, what made “Mayberry” so wonderful was it’s people.  They knew everyone.  They were there to help each other.  They were there to share their troubles, their hurts, their heart aches.

They were invested in each others lives.  They cared.  This is what the modern day “experts” have over looked.  You simply can not recreate a small town just by building buildings.  You can not force people into high rise apartments and expect them to interact with each other.  You can not create a since of community with out providing the avenue for people to get to know their neighbors.  People need and crave interaction with others.

Let’s think about housing with garages in the back and front porches close to the streets.  Let’s think about the local grocery store on the corner with-in walking distance.  Let’s think about the church.  The church should be the neighborhood gathering place.  If we really desire to create a since of pride and community in modern suburbia then let’s look to Mayberry.  After all what it represents is what we all long for.  A since of belonging.

This is the 1st blog for our company and my first blog so here goes. In the beginning there was design/build and we are one of the pioneering companies in the mid west that started using this method of project delivery. We were one of the first to incorporate the practice of architecture with construction all housed under one roof. That was around 1980, and we have been providing and perfecting this service ever since.

Design/build has now become the preferred method of project delivery and now encompasses the majority of all buildings three stories and under nation wide. The buildings below are representative of the types of projects we have constructed using design/build method.

Logic Control Sales

Olathe, Kansas

State Beauty Supply

Lenexa, Kansas

Owner/Agency Benefits

Faster Delivery — collaborative project management means work is completed faster with fewer problems.
Cost Savings — an integrated team is geared toward efficiency and innovation.
Better Quality — design-builders meet performance needs, not minimum design requirements, often developing innovations to deliver a better project than initially imagined.
Singular Responsibility — one entity is held accountable for cost, schedule and performance.
Decreased Administrative Burden — owners can focus on the project rather than managing disparate contracts.
Reduced Risk — the design-build team assumes additional risk.
Reduced Litigation Claims — by closing warranty gaps owners virtually eliminate litigation claims.

If you have an interest in learning more about design/build please let me know.

We all live in the world that wants everything faster, cheaper and better. From our hamburgers to our access to data and now to the facilities most of us live and work in. That’s right, we want our homes and buildings to be designed and built better, less expensive and faster. Now building better is a nobel cause and one can argue that faster does have an impact on the bottom line, but cheaper! Some how that word doesn’t fit into the built environment of buildings. Everyone wants it, even in the current economic climate, with depressed prices, cheaper is still a stretch. It seems that in every down turn buyers expect architects and contractors to work for less, sell for less and lower their fees. This is understandable, but they also want the quality to be higher and completion to be faster.

So how are we to address this issue of cheaper? Actually it’s quite simple. By altering they way we design and build buildings. Design/Build or Integerated Project Delivery, which is currently emerging, are the methods that we can deliver to our clients, buildings that are cheaper (I prefer “less expensive”) built better and are completed in a faster time frame. The following link expands on this thought. http://www.aia.org/practicing/groups/kc/AIAB081816

ScriptPro Pharmacy Automation

Mission, Kansas

Olathe Animal Hospital

Olathe, Kansas

Having said all of this, is LEED right for you or has LEED become a “buzz word” synonymous with energy conscious design. No doubt you have heard the term and you probably have also heard that LEED costs more to implement, but are there real advantages? Would you be better off if you spent more time researching the products to be used in your building? I for one feel that LEED is not necessary for you to achieve an energy efficient and environmentally friendly design. The government has set LEED as a requirement for most if not all of it’s newly constructed facilities. While I applaud them on reaching for this form of energy savings it is us the “owners” of these facilities that are paying the burden of the added costs to achieve LEED status when this could be done with the same energy savings and less cost. It is disputable that LEED actually saves energy as opposed to those newly constructed buildings that are not LEED certified. While I agree that some form of measurable criteria needs to be established, LEED is not necessarily the answer as evidenced in this link. http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=28373659&gid=113822&commentID=25483339&trk=view_disc This series of comment threads are from architects across the country and worth the time to review. So is LEED right for you? Possibly, but other means of energy conscious design can be achieved with out acquiring certain levels of LEED certification.

If you would like more information on this or are seeking energy responsibility in your current or future facilities then i would love to visit with you.