Prioritize, Program, Plan, Price

by Erin Lucero 

Working on the owner side of the design/construction industry for the last ten years, the first question was always “How much will it cost?”  We could be talking about 5 year building plans, capital improvement projects or tiny remodels, and before we’d put pen to paper the question of cost was first and foremost in everyone’s mind. And as an architect, my answer would always be “It depends.” It wasn’t the answer people always wanted to hear, but it was the truth.  It depends on how big the project is, what the materials are, what site challenges we will have, and more recently what the construction industry is doing in terms of material and labor.
It’s like jumping to the last chapter of the book, without first reading the story.  Architects know this process inside and out, and understand that cost and price are huge variables, but it can be hard to explain this to people outside of our industry. Many owners are experts in their own field, but building and construction, especially since 2020, has become an increasingly unpredictable and complicated industry.  Material and labor have become wildcards, and so prices are also all over the map, changing from month to month or even day to day.   During this unprecedented and uncertain times, I think it is well worth revisiting why priorities, programs and planning are all essential tools to utilize before we come to price.
Prioritize
Setting priorities before you even get into pre-design can help create the rules by which all future decisions are made.  What are the end goals your project wants to accomplish?  Is the project required to meet certain energy or sustainability standards?  Who is this project for?  What are the end user’s needs? What would make this a ‘successful’ project?  If you are constructing new office space, is one of the main goals to recruit new people? To provide spaces that are malleable as we change from in-person and work from home dynamics?   If you are designing a residential project, who are you trying to attract?  What are their needs?   What about retail?  What are the measures of success? Creating 4-5 priorities in a project early on will help you evaluate different design professionals, different designs, and when you get to costs, ensure that your core values are not being sacrificed if the costs come in high.
Program
How do we get a square foot cost if we don’t know what the square footage is?  Programming is an essential step in determining the size, shape, configuration, and adjacencies in a building or space.  If you are designing a house, how do you decide how big it is or how many rooms it contains?  First we’d have to understand the size of the family, the way they dine, eat, entertain, and work, to create the size and shape of their house.  Programming is at its fundamental level understanding how we live, work, play, and interact with each other.  A good architect will listen and understand user’s needs; they will study how they interact or what equipment and furniture they use in their space. Then they can create programs, diagrams or other studies that will inform the building design.  For example, an office workstation could range from a five foot desk that is shared by others, to an 8×8 workstation, to a 200 square foot executive office.  The priorities and the program will help narrow down that size, so that the size of the whole space can be planned out and priced.
Planning
Planning is where the average owner starts to see and understand their ideas turning into a real design.  It is where architects bring all that data together and start to really put pen to paper.  It is where we as architects understand how the building could lay out on the site, or the shape and size of the floor plan.  The design begins to look at materiality and structure and elevations.  Planning is where you could get something to the point that you could price!  Planning may take several iterations, and should always be back checked against the priorities set at the beginning of the project.  They are the measuring stick.  Is this design meeting our original goals?  Once you have a preliminary design, you can finally answer that question of how much will it cost.
Pricing
These first three steps are to get a preliminary design far enough along to give a reasonably accurate price.  If an owner is doing a five year capital plan, it is understandably difficult to do these steps before budgets are even approved or set, but they are still essential to get an accurate price.  Some institutions can set company/agency wide priorities and programs for similar buildings so they can short cut this process, but it still has to be done at some point before accurate pricing can be completed. 
Once you have a design and the price comes in aligned with your budget, that’s great!  But if they are not in alignment, then these previous steps can help you value engineer without sacrificing your core values.  It is especially helpful to do this at an early design phase, because projects are still quite malleable. Getting a project priced at 90% or 100% design will make it really hard to respond to price overages.  This can lead to a project that may not get built, or if it does, may not meet all the original priorities. 
As an example, let’s talk about a house design. A house can be fully functional at 1,000 sf or at 3,000 sf, but let’s say you had a design created for that 3,000 sf house. It had all the things you needed, plus many of the things you wanted, but preliminary pricing comes in way higher than your budget.  Now let’s say your core priorities were to have a net zero energy home, to have an office where you could work from home, and to be able to have dinner partiers once a month.  Can you revisit your program and reduce the size of each element, or have shared elements that do double duty, so that you could reduce your square footage to 1,500 sf? Could this bring the project back into budget without sacrificing any core priorities? The same could be applied to offices. Workspace for an employee can be a 200 sf office or 20sf of landing space and will have very different costs.  Prioritizing, programming and planning can help us navigate these varying construction costs and end up with a higher quality project.  In this time of escalating costs and inflation, getting to our essential needs and priorities will allow us to continue being successful in our projects, while adapting to a complex and unpredictable economy.