An Empirical Study Summary on Integrated Building Commissioning for New US Federal Domestic Construction Projects

Authors

  • Bennett Varghese

Abstract

Current management practices for federal domestic construction projects need to be modified to mitigate the negative effects newly constructed buildings have during the first few years of occupation. These negative effects include poor indoor air quality and poor performance of its tenants during the initial years of building occupancy. This empirical study focuses on the staff of the US Mission to the United Nations (USUN) as an off-site temporary facility was built for them in 2004 followed by a permanent office building in 2010. The newly constructed temporary facility exhibited indoor air quality deficiencies and the performance levels of USUN staff were also diminished during the initial years of occupancy. For the construction of the permanent building, the United States Department of State decided to employ a new project management practice of integrated building commissioning. Integrated building commissioning is the systematic, documented and collaborative process including inspection, testing and training conducted to confirm that a building and its component systems meet the requirement of the occupants and conform to the design intent. It involves the special expertise of the client government offices throughout the entire construction process by thoroughly integrating them within the networked process of a major construction project. The permanent USUN building yielded results that showed acceptable levels of satisfaction with the indoor air quality immediately after occupation and the performance levels of the USUN staff also increased comparatively in the initial years after occupation.


Keywords: integrated building commissioning, federal construction projects, construction management

Downloads

Published

2021-01-18

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 3 (2013)

Section

Research Article

License

Declaration and Copyright Transfer Form

(to be completed by authors)

I/ We, the undersigned author(s) of the submitted manuscript, hereby declare, that the above manuscript which is submitted for publication in the STM Journals(s), is not published already in part or whole (except in the form of abstract) in any journal or magazine for private or public circulation, and, is not under consideration of publication elsewhere.

  • I/We will not withdraw the manuscript after 1 week of submission as I have read the Author Guidelines and will adhere to the guidelines.
  • I/We Author(s ) have niether given nor will give this manuscript elsewhere for publishing after submitting in STM Journal(s).
  • I/ We have read the original version of the manuscript and am/ are responsible for the thought contents embodied in it. The work dealt in the manuscript is my/ our own, and my/ our individual contribution to this work is significant enough to qualify for authorship.
  •  I/We also agree to the authorship of the article in the following order:

Author’s name                                    

 

1. ________________

2. ________________

3. ________________

4. ________________

 

We  Author(s) tick this box and would request you to consider it as our signature as we agree to the terms of this Copyright Notice, which will apply to this submission if and when it is published by this journal.