TZL 1288

9

O P I N I O N

Silence of the MEPs

I n my 30 of years of serving as a mechanical, electrical, plumbing design professional, I’ve encountered some honest, admittedly cheeky, comments that you may never have heard from your MEP consulting engineers. On the surface everything might appear to be fine, but back at their office, the consulting engineers might be telling the (painful) truth.

want to be transparent and collaborative; experience shows much better projects and reasonable fees will result. However, if you get inconsistent fees, this might explain why. ❚ ❚ Your Revit model is not half as good as you think it is. Your stairs aren’t modeled properly. Your ceil- ing grid is wrong. You have rooms/walls on the wrong phase. You have copious amounts of detail “Clear communication, a willingness to collaborate as often as necessary, plus some shared compassion for each other’s expertise and daily challenges, will help all of us to create better projects for our clients.”

I share these things to help architects and MEP engineers have a better understanding and appreciation for our respective design endeavors. ❚ ❚ We have no idea what you really do. We MEP engineers think we know, but we really don’t. We haven’t had to market to building owners, layout a floorplan, evaluate life safety issues, estimate total building costs, etc. We don’t know you have to be extremely knowledgeable about everything – includ- ing earthwork, drainage, landscaping, structural, MEPF, acoustics, constructability, sequencing, phas- ing, and more! We think you sit around all day and imagine ways to torture us. Because we look through a microscope at just our stuff all day, we don’t get it. Please share with us the big picture stuff. Our MEP designs will be better for it. ❚ ❚ My fee is directly proportional to how difficult you are to deal with. It is personal. It changes over time. It changes with every person in your office. We

Bill Hodge GUEST SPEAKER

See BILL HODGE, page 10

THE ZWEIG LETTER March 18, 2019, ISSUE 1288

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