BIMBO does Armani

The New Thinking Concept : Getting away from convention. Cesar’s description – “removing inhibitions” - As a practice we were delivering drawings and documents to our clients. Our deliverables.  Now we were going to deliver a model as our deliverable.  This was great, but we faced a problem.  We had two distinct camps, those who knew how to construct and those who thought they knew. Although subtle, this made a huge difference. It took some time to figure out a solution, but the bottom line was that we borrowed a psychometric test of field work aptitude from a Health Charity and gave it to everyone.  It was a surprising result; the first group - those people who were hands on and had worked on sites adapted a lot quicker.  The second group - the people with soft clean hands who had never worked on a site or seen the materials actually applied and true academics would become very resilient to the new thinking.  There was a coup developing.  The Pearl - The solution was to get every one of those in the second group out on sites as soon as possible to get an appreciation of how things are put together in the real world.  This was the best thing ever done for this group.

I digress; there were some fun moments, which I must share.  One of our architect, who was always immaculate and was nicknamed Armani.  Now Armani took great pride in producing his drawings and documents and his desk was so well organised it would make the British Library look untidy.  Armani, as part of the clean soft hands brigade, went to a site where he saw some of his drawings on the floor.  These drawings had seen reasonable abuse, typical of a site.  On seeing this drawing he summoned the foreman.  The foreman listened, shrugged his shoulders, shook his head in despair, picked up the drawing and rolled it into a neat cohiba, gave the Armani the birdy with this rolled baton, shoved it into his back pocket and carried on with his business.  This wasn’t the last we heard!  An email followed from Armani, to our MD, “The heathens of construction need to respect people’s work and this sort of behaviour was not tolerated…[ 100s of words later]…. an apology was due from the contractor.”  Now our MD, following due process, naturally, forwarded this to the principal contractor.  The principal contractor, in response apologised, and sent a gift to the upset architect.  The gift was an Armani Tie – LOL.  Armani soon left, as he thought he didn’t fit in to the insanity that was being played.  Back to business or insanity as some would say.

This new thinking concept also changed the sequence in which things were done and how they were done.  We needed a new process.  The thinking behind this process was lifted straight from the aerospace and automotive industries.  There were two types of designs requirements; form design (what it looks like) and functional design (and how it works) – self-explanatory.  While BIM is important in form design cycle, it is the key to functional design.  The process we created was for the latter.  We created “cells”, for a better word within the process.  These cells carried out specific function within any design project.  The first group of cells was the material and component.  The second group was assemblies. The third group was systems and the fourth was integration.  Today, we have 3 groups, [1] Elemental Design & Engineering, [2] System Design & Engineering and [3] Integration Design & Engineering.  Whether you are building an office block or a railway station or even a single dwelling, the hierarchical process is followed to the letter.