What is constructible design?

Team Arcol

Constructible design is building design with cost and construction feasibility in the same loop. Design, preconstruction, and owners share one grounded building information model (BIM) instead of handing work over a wall and paying for miscommunication later.

AEC has long treated design and construction as completely separate activities. And while the person swinging the hammer continues to be different than the person sketching the concept, integrated delivery modes like Design|Build and CM-at-Risk are on the rise.

Every owner we talk to is expecting more with less. Within that context, accepting the “norm” of remodeling the same design twice, designing with no cost or constructability signal, and waiting weeks on email loops just doesn’t make sense anymore.

What are the principles of constructible design?

There are three principles of constructible design: cost as a design tool, less decision making debt in value engineering, and a shared language.

Cost is a design tool

Cost isn’t what compromises design. It’s a tool that the best designers learn to leverage, and it’s a mandate builders should expect.

You wouldn’t shop for a car without a budget, yet this is exactly how most buildings are created.

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The disagreement we’ve heard is that designers think cost limits creativity, and builders think that designers believe design isn’t grounded in reality. Constructible design creates a middle ground for both parties.

Value engineering is a receipt not a phase

Value engineering isn’t simply a phase of a project - it’s a receipt for decisions made months earlier without constructible design at the table.

It’s unlikely we get rid of 100% of VE, but similar to accepting that “designers don’t do cost” we’ve accepted that VE is a massive constraint of every project.

Designers and preconstruction teams both shudder at VE but both accept it as a foregone conclusion, in reality it’s paying for a debt that never needed to be incurred in the first place.

Worse still, consider a fairly common scenario: Owner falls for a concept that was never priced properly; months later VE strips the thing everyone loved. Everyone goes back to the drawing board and has lost. Constructible design won’t erase every VE exercise—but it will make this kind of debt rarer.

Design and construction need a common language

Design and construction speak different languages. Design speaks drawings and specs, while construction speaks quantities and line items. Constructible design gives a common language without changing how they work.

When the design tool captures and communicates both the drawings and the construction quantities, teams can focus on the art of on-budget, buildable designs. Leave the boring stuff like quantity extraction, or system rules to the technology.

Most technology in AEC is fixated on making the life of a single team better, but the high-value outcomes are a team sport. Design and Construction are the most consequential teams.

What does constructible design look like in practice?

In practice, constructible design is a shared loop: design moves, cost moves with it, and everyone is working from the same basis.

Designers still work in a real design environment, creativity intact, while cost is embedded in the same model.

That design conveys cost structure and quantities that preconstruction teams can actually start from. Estimating teams have more than a drawing set in hand to begin their process.

The two are interwoven, a change on either side impacts the other.

Who benefits from constructible design?

Designers and builders should rejoice with less rework, less last-minute redesign and earlier cost signals but the real impact will be felt by owners.

The way this will be different from past promises (see BIM) is through the owner lens. A better owner or client experience is something that will be felt with constructible design at its core. That in turn will become the competitive differentiator for firms who embrace this.