The Edith Green–Wendell Wyatt building in Portland, Oregon, is LEED Platinum–certified, having been overhauled to achieve an expected 50 percent reduction in energy use compared to its performance prerenovation. The project is also expected to reduce potable water use by 60 percent—primarily by using rainwater for flush fixtures. Those are amazing improvements, from an environmental perspective, that could not have been achieved without an extremely integrated team functioning at a high level.

To add another level of complexity, the building is a federal project that is subject to low-bid restrictions, eliminating the possibility of an integrated project delivery contract. So how was this team able to integrate and achieve such successful outcomes? Patrick Brunner, project manager for the US General Services Administration, proved that “where there is a will, there’s a way.” As a federal project, the project was required to use a Guaranteed Maximum Price structure. The contracting model that conformed to that structure while offering the most flexibility was a “Construction Manager as Constructor” model. Brunner spent extra time and effort interviewing those who responded to the Request for Proposals and tried to personally visit potential contractors and suppliers at their locations or went to see previous projects they had completed. Once the right team was assembled, Lisa Petterson, principal at SERA Architects, recalls that Brunner came in and said, “the contract can’t do this, but let’s all sign this one-page agreement as a working understanding of how we’ll proceed.” The team agreed on an open checkbook policy, for financial transparency, and then developed principles for acting collaboratively and making joint decisions.

One of the proactive steps they took as a part of this policy, according to Petterson, was that during construction the design field team was located in the same space as the general contractor. For subcontractors, “one of the biggest impediments to getting their job done is access to information.” According to Petterson, the conventional process usually goes like this: the subcontractor has to figure out what’s missing, write the Request for Information, get it to the contractor, who gets it to the architect, who passes it to the engineer, who goes to the supplier. “The whole process takes three and a half weeks, and that’s if you understood the question.”

So instead, the team maintained an “open door policy” during business hours, where anyone could ask questions. “That hurt our [short-term] productivity but helped our overall project delivery,” says Petterson. As a result, this project had just 855 formal Requests for Information, compared to 6,000 on a typical similar project, and many times they were “just confirming information for the paper trail,” says Petterson.

The collaborative environment also paid off because it allowed the project team to better adjust to unforeseen challenges. After pricing out the designed 2-foot-wide exterior sunshades, the material supplier made the suggestion that they could utilize the material more efficiently if the shades were narrowed to 18 inches. The architects went back to the drawing board and found that with a slight adjustment they could pull the shades away from the wall by 6 inches and get the shading they needed. “It only took us one day to figure out how to make that work,” says SERA Architects Associate Principal Lisa Petterson, “and we saved the project millions of dollars.”

Another slight change of direction occurred when tenants began signing on after design was complete and demanded their own local server capacity. The project team had been intending to monitor and control the servers from a different location to maintain valuable usable space in the building [and to more easily reach energy use intensity (EUI) goals], but the tenants made their needs clear. According to Matthew Braun, project executive at Howard S. Wright (the project’s general contractor), the team developed the solution to co-locate all the servers in the basement, rather than have them on every floor. This required gaining buy-in from the tenants since they had to pay more, but it allowed the team to maintain the building’s original EUI goal because the centralized system enabled them to use heat recovery. A 100-ton heat recovery chiller now serves the server room and is big enough to accommodate future growth. “In a non-integrated team, the whole project would have been delayed while we figured out where and how we were going to locate and manage the servers,” says Braun. Instead, they were able to add the entire system after all the original mechanical and electrical infrastructure had been installed, and the project moved along as planned.

The project team generated enough savings to pay for one more year of professional services, which they used for operations and maintenance training and extensive post-occupancy surveys—an added value that often gets left by the wayside. After a project that saw such success, Brunner argues that what’s most important is a project team that “collectively believes in pushing to do something better.” He sees the contract form “as a tool” and hopes that something like a three-party agreement can be developed for federal use, but “it will never be a silver bullet,” he says. “It’s the constant care and feeding and raising the bar—the constant forming, reforming, and storming—that make the magic.”