If there’s a word that Barry Bannett, the recipient of the DBIA’s Brunelleschi Lifetime Achievement Award, would use to describe his view, approach and conception of the right approach to building and construction, it’s “team.” And over nearly 40 years of private practice with his own company, The Bannett Group Ltd., it laid the foundation for a career in which design-build is the foundation.
“When I entered into private practice in 1970, keeping that in mind, I wanted to make sure that everybody that I worked with and did my work were qualified contractors and qualified engineers,” he says. “So I quickly started doing teaming and construction management and dealing directly with the owners and the team members so that I could get competent, qualified people to produce my buildings.”
In doing so – and discovering that time and money were the drivers behind the construction industry – Bannett realized that the most productive and effective way to build a building was when all players are involved from the beginning.
In the five years before starting The Bannett Group, he had discovered something that was particularly puzzling about the industry, particularly with the design-bid-build approach to construction.
“While I was working in that arena, I kind of ended up with the idea that the building industry didn’t make any sense to me because people weren’t qualified, but they were identifying in the competitive bidding world the only qualification was low bid, not necessarily whether it was a qualified person to do the job,” he says. “Times were not easy back then, and people who wanted to build buildings were serious but they wanted to make sure that they got their value.”
With this revelation, Bannett easily discovered that through design-build — or through control inherent in single-source responsibility, stepping to the table and taking and managing the risk — projects could be delivered on time and on budget.
“I didn’t know why everybody didn’t do it,” he says.
He adds that his approach to the business was sometimes a “lonely road,” and he often found it tough to get support from many corners of the industry.
“It really wasn’t until ’94 when I met up with DBIA that I found support,” he says. “It was just such a revelation to meet people who were interested in building buildings in the teaming approach.”
One key component to Bannett’s approach, he says, is that he was lucky enough to have the insight to realized “there was much more to building a building or completing a project than just the architecture.”
This approach involved more professionals on the design, engineering and the production side.
“As an architect I felt that I had a professional obligation to my customers to help them and assist them to make the right decisions with all these people,” he says. “I began to understand that all these people were involved in the process, and you have to include them in the beginning of the process or else you don’t get your buildings built.”
At the 2008 Design-Build Conference & Exhibition, he was recognized by his peers for that career-long commitment to design-build with the Brunelleschi Lifetime Achievement Award.
“The concept of teaming and design-build and bringing all those people together around the table in the beginning of a job is essential to a successful project — which doesn’t exist in design-bid-build,” he says. “I always took the role — even before I did design-build in the ‘80s — as a team player. I wanted to bring people to the table, and we wanted to work together.”