Name: Adam Knaggs
Employer: SDC Builders
Project: NAPP Phase 1, Buildings 194,196 & 198, Cambridge Science Park, Trinity College, Cambridge
Contract: JCT 2005
The tension between design quality and financial necessity was admirably balanced by Adam Knaggs on this project.
With the estimated costs significantly over budget, Adam pursued rigorous value-engineering to bring them back into line. He reduced curtain walling costs by around £200 per square metre while maintaining high acoustic and solar performance. He found cheaper rainscreen cladding alternatives that met the appearance and performance specification. And he procured numerous alternative products that fitted the design brief but were more competitively priced.
His key value-engineering initiative was to take on the M&E management direct. He not only sourced the labour force, but also the majority of the material and specialist suppliers. It removed a layer of management, and allowed him to undertake more innovative design solutions. Replacing the specified chilled ceiling with a chilled beam solution saved £1m alone.
Yet in the drive to control costs, Adam never let quality slip out of focus. He built a sample core area to handover standard 10 months prior to project completion so that agreement on quality and appearance could be reached early on. It also gave him an understanding of the specific issues and benchmarked quality.
He finished the pond and external area four months early to allow the landscaping to mature for the opening. And even though the value engineering had removed the architect’s original requirement for aligning all tiling joints within the toilet cores, Adam delivered the design desire without the construction cost.
Likewise, he successfully mitigated the risk to the envelope, generated by the design complexities and the sizable degree of value engineering it had undergone. He did so by placing the whole package with a single cladding supplier with a good design facility and high level of site management rather than a shoal of smaller subcontractors.
Along with his fair and accurate cost reporting, his concern for quality won him the trust of the client and the design team. When the site was flooded with sewage from a foul main rupture early on, he dealt with it quickly and efficiently. He recleaned the site in a week, removing over 100,000 gallons of sewage without insisting on formal instruction before proceeding.
Value: £27.3m