… Buildability…

Introduction

Buildability is increasingly becoming a major requirement in building practice. The industry’s

clients are continuously demanding the best value for money, in terms of the efficiency with
which the building is carried out. The integration of good buildability into good overall
design is the responsibility of the design team.

Researchs in the world has shown that good buildability leads to major cost benefits for
clients, designers, and builders. Secondly, the achievement of good buildability depends
upon both designers and builders being able to see the whole construction process through
each other’s eyes.

'Buildability is the extent to which the design of a building facilitates ease of construction,
subject to the overall requirements for the completed building'
(Construction Industry Research and Information Association (CIRIA),

‘The extent to which the design of a building facilitates the ease of construction, subject
to the overall requirements for the completed building’
(Gray, 1990)
The definition has two major implications:
1. Buildability exists on a scale from good to bad. A design with good buildability takes close
account of the way it is to be constructed and vice versa.
2. Each building has overall requirements which may necessitate the acceptance of less than
good buildability
 Buildability in construction projects

The word buildability, appears to have first entered the language in the late nineteen
seventies. Buildablity and constructability are synonyms for a concept that has evolved over a
number of years. Some architects have identified it as the only management concept to have
been designed and developed by the construction industry for the construction industry. They
suggested that this is because the separation of design and construction processes is unique to
the construction industry.

The division between the process of design and construction was recognized as contributing
to inefficiencies throughout the construction industry. The problem was seen to be that of
communication and co-ordination between contractual parties, and the focus was on the need
for greater co-operation and co-ordination of the people and processes involved in
construction. Emmerson (1962) identified a number of specific factors contributing to potential
inefficiency in the construction industry including;

 Inadequate documentation of projects before they are put out for tender
 Complex and inefficient pre-contract design procedures
 Lack of communication between architects and contractors, sub-contractors and
other consultants.

Banwell (1964) supported this with his view that in the traditional contracting situation. The
contractor is too far from the design stage for his specialized knowledge to be put to use. He
suggested that the complexities of modern construction and its requirement for specialized
techniques demanded that the design process and the construction stages should not be
regarded as separate fields of activity.

Research into buildability can be split into two types: that which looks at broad systems of
construction and the building process in general, and that which looks at particular heuristic
principles of how to design buildings for better assembly or constructability.
Buildability Systems
Much of the more recent research into buildability has focused on the broader view of what it
takes to make a building easier to construct. In particular, research at the University of
Newcastle, Australia has developed a conceptual model of buildability. This model can be used
to identify buildability factors within project specific environments. Development of the model
relies on a systems view of the design-construction process. This model seeks to understand the
entire construction process as a system of interrelated activities and people, each of which may
have an impact on the construction process.

Using such a systems approach the researchers have identified three dimensions to the model
of buildability. These are:
1. The participants - Clients, users, financiers, regulatory bodies, contractors, designers,
and numerous others.
2. The buildability factors - The cultural and technological activities that might be
undertaken to achieve ease of assembly
3. The stages of the building life cycle - feasibility study, design, documentation,
construction, commissioning, and demolition or deconstruction.

In several research projects it could be shown that by the selective dismantling instead of the
destruction of buildings the environmental burden of recycled construction materials could be
decreased. Furthermore, these projects showed that environment-friendly dismantling and
recycling strategies can even sometimes prove to be advantageous from an economic point of
view. Nevertheless selective dismantling requires extensive manpower, for the necessary
deconstruction work. As a consequence required manpower represents a significant expense
factor in the recycling loop of building materials arising from selective dismantled buildings. On
the other hand, the possibilities of downstream sorting of building waste as well as the material
separation by recycling and preparation devices are not completely taken into account in the
present procedure of selective dismantling. In order to reduce the costs of dismantling and to
encourage the cost efficient production of mineral recycling products, deconstruction, sorting
of building waste and the potentialities of recycling plants should be combined in an integrated
approach.

Based on these results a computer supported planning system will be developed, which makes
it possible to plan the dismantling of buildings taking sorting and preparation into
consideration. This approach starts with the requirements of the different recycling options,
adapting the amount of material separation to avoid expensive dismantling processes if
possible. Thus the costs for the dismantling of buildings can be decreased while the quality of
the recycling materials to be produced maintained or can be increased.

The requested separation of building materials can be achieved by different techniques. The
most efficient among them is the selective dismantling of buildings. Due to the fact, that every
single building element can be separated from the others, the achievable separation of the
building materials is extremely high. But on the other hand an extensive dismantling leads to
high personnel costs. Depending on the prices for disposal and recycling in the region the
building is situated in these personnel costs can be higher than the savings caused by less
expansive disposal.

More frequently than with selective dismantling, the different building materials are separated
by manual sorting after the demolition of the building. The material separation achieved by
manual sorting is not as exact as if the building were dismantled. In many cases sorting takes
less time which makes it cheaper compared to dismantling. That means, that if the
requirements regarding the purity of the recycling material are not very strict, sorting is
probably preferred. Some building elements such as water pipes and cables, located under the
plaster or iron radiators can even be better sorted afterwards rather than being dismantled, at
least from an economic point of view.