CONTRACTS FOR BUILDING

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 20, 19 October 1943, Page 3

CONTRACTS FOR BUILDING

Master Schedule System POSSIBLE UwPRO YEMEN T SUGGESTED

A possible improvement on the “master schedule’’ system of contract, used in the erection of defence buildings and now said to be contemplated for State bouses, is suggested by a "New Zealand Herald” correspondent, who quotes a leading English architectural authority in its favour. He writes: Under the Government’s system a builder undertakes to carry out a job for a fixed sum, based on unit prices for material and labour as determined beforehand by Government quantity surveyors. The builder’s margin of profit. is increased or decreased, "according to the efficiency and organization of the work. As it seems possible that an effort will be made after the war, and possibly sooner, to apply this system to private building in substitution for competitive contract, it is worth while to point out one marked disadvantage. The client is deprived of any benefit that may exist in competitive tendering and is bound to pay the sum determined by the quantity surveyors. The builder is assured an overall payment, and it is still in his interest to complete the job as cheaply as possible, because all savings go to him, not to tlie client. If he is at all unscrupulous, and the supervision is lax or faulty, everything that he can “get away with’’ means more profit to him. Lu short, the system frees the builder from competition, but by no means ensures the client a first-class job. A different plan, which seems to be infinitely better from the client's point of view and yet quite good from the builder’s, was advocated some years ago bv Professor C. 11. Reilly, 0.13. hi., then principal of the Liverpool University School of Architecture, probably the leading institution of its kind iu the Empire. “The real difficulty,” Professor Reilly ■wrote, “is that we may make drawings as complete and thorough as is humanly possible; we may write long specifications and have the number of bricks and the amount of all other material and labour to be used assessed beforehand by a quantity surveyor, yet quality of material and workmanship enters so largely into every stage that no one can definitely say at the end that the contract has been carried out to the letter. Further, we may appoint clerks-of-works and other watch-dogs to follow the contractor at every step on the building itself, or rather to attempt it, and yet we may be fooled by work made off the site and brought to it, or by work done on the job and covered up before the architect or any of his agents, including the clerk-of-works, can see it. . . . • , , “By far the most satisfactory work it has been my lot to carry out. as well as the most enjoyable, has been done under a system of actual cost plus a fixed profit. In this, to begin with, a careful estimate is made by independent quantity surveyors of the cost of tue proposed work, and both the builder’s and the architect’s remuneration is fixed from the outset. If the building costs more than the estimate, neither profits by the excess. What is the result? Everyone starts on the building operations as friends and helpers. In place of antagonistic individual effort you have team work. The larger experience of materials, which the average builder who works for many architects possesses, is placed freely at the architect’s, and consequently at the client’s, disposal. . . . We all kijow. even as free-traders, that the desire to buy in the cheapest market has many qualifications. Among them is human nature, and there .is. a great deal, of human nature in building, and specially in good building.”