Development of a LEED Certified Building—A Case Study
7.1 Project Background and Overview
In August 2009 the Mason School of Business at the College of William & Mary began classes in a new classroom and office building. Miller Hall, a LEED Gold certified 166,000 SF building, may be viewed as one link in a green supply chain for business education for undergraduate, graduate and corporate continuing education.
The new building serves as a platform for a wide variety of sustainable research and educational activities within the Mason community. This chapter describes the design and construction process with emphasis on those activities involved with the LEED certification process.
Prior to August 2009, the Mason School of Business was housed in four loca- tions. Undergraduate and graduate classes were taught in two different buildings with most support functions in those buildings; however, offices for the School’s de- velopment staff and some enterprise support staff were in two additional off-campus locations. This was inefficient from a management perspective and was not con- ducive to building a sense of community within the various members of the Mason School. Following a 5 year period of feasibility studies, architectural programming and fundraising a design and construction effort began in late 2005.
The new building project was to be executed through a public-private partnership.
The public entity partner was the College of William & Mary and the private entity partner was the Business School Foundation of the College of William & Mary.
The College of William & Mary is part of the state university system of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Originally founded in 1693 by royal charter of King R. M. Holmlin ()
Mason School of Business, The College of William and Mary, 101 Ukrop Way, Williamsburg, VA 23185, USA
e-mail: [email protected]
T. Boone et al. (eds.), Sustainable Supply Chains, 97
International Series in Operations Research & Management Science 174,
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-6105-1_7, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012
College of William &
Mary
Building Commiee
Business School Foundaon
Project Manager
Architect &
Sub- Consultants
LEED Cerficaon
Task Team
Construcon Manager &
Sub- Contractors
Fig. 7.1 Project organization chart
William III and Queen Mary II, the College of William & Mary is the second oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. At the time of the Miller Hall project there were 570 faculty and 7,700 students at the College of William & Mary.
The Mason School of Business School had approximately 110 faculty and staff, 300 graduate students and approximately 1,000 undergraduates.
The responsibility for the development of the new building was assigned to the Business School Foundation through a Memorandum of Understanding between the College and the Business School Foundation. Management oversight of the project was vested in a nine member building committee with five members from the Busi- ness School Foundation and four members from the College of William & Mary.
The Building Committee was co-chaired by the Dean of the Business School and the Assistant Vice President for Administration from the College. The responsibility for the day-to-day management of the project rested with a project manager retained by the Business School Foundation. Figure7.1shows the organization of the project.
Based on feasibility and programming studies the new building was to be approx- imately 166,000 SF in size with an approximately 61,000 SF ‘U’ shaped footprint.
The building was to have three stories and a partial basement. To be compatible with the older, or ancient campus at the College, the building exterior was to be Geor- gian style although the Building Committee directed that the building interior was to convey a sense of a twenty first century business school.
The project budget was $75 million. Table 7.1shows the major cost categories of the project’s budget. Funding for the project was provided through the public-
Table 7.1 Project budget
Budget category Budget Cost/SF As percentage
($) ($) of budget
Architect-engineer fees 7,465,881 44.98 9.95
Pre-construction services 330,000 1.99 0.44
Construction (GMP) 52,107,701 313.90 69.48
Furniture, fixtures & equipment 3,439,800 20.72 4.59
IT/AV & security 3,531,978 21.28 4.71
Project inspection 420,000 2.53 0.56
Other costs 4,060,000 24.46 5.41
Owner’s contingency 3,644,640 21.96 4.86
Total 75,000,000 451.81 100.00
private partnership. Two-thirds of the project’s budget ($50MM) was provided by the private entity portion of the partnership and one third ($25MM) was provided from the public entity of the partnership. $25MM of the Foundation’s funding was to be donations and $25MM was to be raised through issuance of bonds. All of the College’s funding was to be raised through the issuance of a separate $25MM of bonds. Any project cost overruns were to be paid for by the private entity portion of the partnership. Not surprisingly, project cost management was extremely important to the Business School Foundation.
The project used a construction manager at risk with a guaranteed maximum price form of project delivery.1This allowed the project team to have the benefits of construction expertise during the design phases of the project. A pre-construction services contract for $330,000 was executed with the Whiting-Turner Contracting Company following a selection process that included submission of qualifications, interviews and review of references. Key duties of the Construction Manager during the design phase included cost estimating, verification of scope-budget match and constructability review of the design documents.
The project had two architects. The Architect of Record, responsible for the con- struction documents, was Mosley Architects headquartered in Richmond, Virginia.
The design architect, responsible for the design concept, was Robert AM Stern (RAMSA) of New York city. From a contractual perspective the design architect was a sub-consultant to the architect-of-record. Design began in the spring of 2006 and included a number of benchmarking trips to other business schools to look at recent design concepts for business schools particularly with regard to classrooms and teaching walls.
Architectural programming called for 14 classrooms, 2 seminar rooms, a financial markets classroom, 28 team rooms for student and project teams, a café and a 4,000 SF multi-purpose room.
1The Construction Manager at Risk with a Guaranteed Maximum Price form of project delivery allows an Owner to select a construction manager on the basis of qualifications and price; typically early in the project the design is not completed so the price selection is based on pre-construction services. When the design is more advanced, but still not complete, the construction manager provides a guaranteed maximum price (GMP) which provides a cost ceiling and a degree of cost protection for the Owner.
The site chosen for the project was a parking lot located on Jamestown Road at the western gateway to the William & Mary campus. The new building would front on Ukrop Drive and have a building axis parallel to the longitudinal axis of the sunken garden of the historic campus of the College. The site selected for Miller Hall site was originally developed by a project done by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) during the 1930’s. That project included a stable and a riding ring for students. Over the years the stable became the Center for Archeological Research (CAR) and the riding ring became a parking lot for day students and staff. As part of the Miller Hall project, the parking lot and CAR building would be demolished.
Project cost management was an important aspect of the project management effort and, as noted earlier, was of great interest to the Business School Foundation. As design began, the project team developed a building cost estimate using an analogous estimating technique.2This allowed the project team to identify more accurately the square footage of the new building that was affordable and to compare this budget feasible size to the proposed architectural program. The draft architectural program was approximately 20,000 SF larger than the budget feasible size of the building based on the analogous cost estimate. This allowed the project team to trim back the architectural program which was the basis for design. The data for the similar projects used in the analogous estimate came from the architects and the construction manager. This data included not only total costs for the comparable projects, but data for key components of the building including electrical and mechanical systems. This information, in the standard Construction Specifications Institute (CSI) 16 Division3 format, allowed the project team to develop design to cost targets for the architects and sub-consultant engineers. As the design progressed, the project team also used the Construction Industry Institute’s (CII) Project Definition Rating Index (PDRI) to help evaluate the completeness of the project scope definition (Construction Industry Institute1999). Other cost management tools included value engineering studies conducted at the end of schematic design and reconciliation of cost estimates and both the schematic and design development phases of design.
To aid in constructability and in cost management the project team identified several key sub-contractors based on the importance of their work in the project. For instance, because there were more than 500,000+bricks on the building exterior and the Georgian architecture was a critical architectural design feature, the brick mason was identified as a key trade and included as a design-assist sub-contractor.
Other sub-contractors selected to participate in the design-assist program included the mechanical, electrical and structural steel erector. These sub-contractors were selected on a qualifications and cost basis and brought on early to work with the architects and engineering sub-consultants. These sub-contractors provided input to the design team on issues of constructability and cost. This paid significant benefits
2Analogous estimating uses similar or analogous projects, as a basis for developing a cost estimate.
The cost of each comparable project is adjusted for location and date of construction to assist in determining a cost for the subject project.
3The CSI 16 Division format was standard in the construction industry until 2004 and included 16 categories such as sitework, steel, woodwork, mechanical and electrical components of work.
during construction in not only ease of construction and cost, but also construction quality and schedule.
The target completion date for the project called for classes to begin in August of 2009. Including time required for commissioning of the building’s mechanical sys- tems, move in of faculty and staff as well as spin-up of the new building a substantial completion in early June of 2009 was required. Based on a projected 26 month con- struction schedule, the project team opted for a fast-track approach to the overall schedule which allowed for a March 30, 2007 groundbreaking. However, as is com- mon in fast-track projects, the design was not complete at the time of groundbreaking.
While the site, building foundation and structural steel design was complete, interior design was still underway when construction began.
The construction team made use of mock-ups including exterior wall mock-ups as well as classroom mock-ups and extensive use of “first-work” to establish quality standards for follow-on work. The project had several types of classrooms including traditional tiered classrooms and a new cluster classroom design that allowed students to move easily from a lecture mode to being “clustered” around oval shaped table to work in groups for more experiential learning. As part of the design and construction process, classroom mock-ups were built and faculty participated in final adjustments of tier heights, sight-lines and the shape of tables in the classrooms.
The project achieved substantial completion on schedule in June 2009 and was slightly under budget. Faculty and staff began to move into the building the week after the July fourth holiday. Within a week of move-in, the first corporate contin- uing education courses were being held as part of the building’s “spin-up” process.
Undergraduate and graduate classes began in August 2009.