Establishing your Brief
A Brief is a statement of needs about your intentions and projects objectives.
This will provide the basis for turning your aspirations into a deliverable project and give direction to the architect and other professionals. If your expectations are not clearly outlined and understood by all parties, you run the risk of spending unnecessary money, encountering project complications, costly delays and ultimately not achieving what you set out to. In this sense it is considered an essential component of a project. Time spent in clarifying the brief at the outset is well worth the effort.
A basic brief should include information on the following;
Rooms & spaces
All rooms/spaces required should be listed and described in as much detail as is known; how will they be used, who will use them and how big do they need to be. The size can be described in square meters, by the number of people a room needs to accommodate or perhaps it is dictated by a large piece of equipment or furniture – in any case it is an architect’s role to help you with this if you are unsure.
A detailed list of rooms and spaces will enable an architect to calculate the overall floor area of your project which will in turn allow them to more accurately advise on what is feasible.
Project Programme
Clients will typically have a set timeline, key dates or a desired completion date in mind at the outset. Communicating these in the Brief will avoid misunderstandings and ensure that every team member is working towards the same target.
If timelines are unrealistic or unknown an architect can advise on this.
Budget
Most typically a project Budget is described as the Construction Cost. That is, how much a client allocates solely to construction or in other words how much a contractor will be paid to build it. This therefore excludes professional fees, taxes and other costs. The Budget can of course be defined differently for any given project but in all cases to avoid misunderstandings it is important to have clearly defined in the Brief what it does and does not include.
In some cases, a Client might need help in establishing or verifying a project Budget and in those cases carrying out a Feasibility Study with specialist input from a Cost Consultant can prove invaluable.
A Brief will usually develop over time from a client’s initial statement of need (or vision) to a more detailed project brief for a design team to work to. A good example of this is when Ami of LBBC worked on the refurbishment of an office & warehouse building for a charity.
At the very beginning the charity set out their statement of needs which included;
wanting to attract the public to the building,
the potential to increase revenue by creating spaces that could be rented out for events,
improving the wellbeing of their staff,
creating a building that persons of all abilities could access without assistance,
have permissions in place to meet specific funding criteria (time deadline)
From this initial vision the client and architect worked incrementally and collaboratively over a number of weeks to develop a brief which could turn these aspirations into a set of spatial, technical and environmental instructions – the project brief. This included identifying specific visitor focussed spaces such as a café and exhibition space, and layers of detail for each right down to the food they would serve or the objects they should display. Such a collaborative briefing process is not uncommon and often brings the best results.
For the next post we’ll look at Estimating your Budget