Current Issue

Crit 68: The Value of Value Engineering (Fall 2009)

As a term, “value engineering” is quite loaded, if not euphemistic, and tends to be associated with the removal of architecture, rather than its addition, referring to that moment in the design process when the desires of a project are reconciled against the realities of a budget.

A military-industrial creation (developed at General Electric during World War II), value engineering was simply defined by a cost/function equation in which “value” was “engineered” by either decreasing cost or increasing function, or both. The consequences of this type of thinking, which inherently “values” those aspects of a project that are most easily measurable, have been seen not just in the built environment, but also in education, medicine, and other areas that are largely dictated through bureaucratic means (inherently geared toward “justifiable” decision-making).

Value engineering tends to occur at the end of a project, when the ability to make changes is low and the cost to make change is high. It is often the timing of value engineering that makes it contentious. But value engineering as a thought experiment–done earlier on in the process–can be valuable in helping clarify values. There are endless quotations espousing the importance of core values in the decision-making process, but making decisions can just as easily serve to help establish core values.

The authors in this issue consider the relevance of values with respect to the individual architect, the collective profession, and society as a whole. Questions of values relate to questions of responsibilities, which are answered differently depending on the scope. In architecture responsibility tends be defined at the level of the individual rather than as a collective profession, whereas collective professional responsibility in law or medicine can perhaps be more easily cast back into individual values.

At a societal level, if architecture is considered to be a luxury, it becomes difficult to argue for its relevance in a time of limited resources. However, by pushing its values, architecture argues for its role in allocating these resources. Values can ultimately be the source of value, as we have seen with the development of “sustainability” as much for its potential to increase profit as to reduce carbon.

Well before the recent economic contraction, and in part as a response to the perceived excesses of building, there was a backlash against partitioning the creation of value from a larger consideration of values. If “financial engineering” on Wall Street has been cast into permanent suspicion for its ability to (with the potential for significantly negative consequences) create “something out of nothing”, “value engineering” in the built environment maintains a certain amount of potential for that exact same reason. I think we will find over time, and in increasing proportion, that the least controversial incarnation of value engineering is also its most productive; namely, the creation of value where none existed previously.

Zachary R. Heineman
2009-2011 Editor-in-Chief