-Working With the Preliminary Budget

Hi my name is Jorge Barrero. I am a senior designer and vice president at HKS Chicago. Today we're going to talk about a project located in Al Kharj, Saudi Arabia. When we started the project, you know, we always asked the question, what the budget is and sometimes the clients do know what it is, sometimes they don't. In this case the client, who was The School of Medicine, they had a preliminary budget for the project which was relatively flexible. Mostly because the funding that the University gets it goes through approval by sort of the local government.

But being that it is a kingdom it's not a process like here in the US. And so the dean in conversations, you know about budget, you know he was very clear that you know we needed to design to a per square foot budget. But there was definitely flexibility in terms of the materiality as well as sort of the scope as long as it met their needs.

They were never very forthcoming in terms of what the budget to design should be. And that's not a typical of many projects we work with. And more often that not we don't have a good gut check of how much a project is going to cost until we have a good set of documentation that gets to be priced.

Now we did not have a contractor on board early on in this project but we did work with a local architect who had a fairly good pulse on costs. And so they were giving us feedback and guidance in terms of certain mechanical systems, materials, what would be feasible that would not push the budget, you know, to a place where you know, we just couldn't afford to build those ideas.

So we did work with a local partner that helped give us a local perspective in terms of construction costs comparable to other hospitals and teaching facilities that they worked on. For us to design to a budget, even though we didn't quite know what that budget was. So primarily it was designed to meet the program with some fair assumptions that would make it a reasonably cost building.

But at the same time we didn't want to, you know handicap ourselves and propose some ideas that wouldn't in the long term save them some money as well.

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