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Design as build

Yunnan- Shanghai, 23rd  January 2010

I am writing this blog as I am catching my flight back to Shanghai. It has been an interesting 2 days of meetings on site! To my big surprise (and other consultants, operator included) we found out that the hotel resort had already started construction! What? We have yet to start our lighting design, this was supposed to be our kick off meeting! But on site we could already see the beginning of what is to become the freeform pool with some villa’s already structurally completed! Interior designer and landscape consultant who had been on board for a while are still in conceptual design stage, yet site is already progressing on preliminary drawings that have yet to be approved!

Welcome to China! This is something that some of you may encounter as well in the design process in your part of the world. In our case the client had been pushing the local architect and the local design institute (LDI as commonly referred to in China) to move on with the works while in actual fact the design is still to be completed. My biggest worry now being that site works have progressed to a stage that any changes or modifications flowing from our lighting design may become practically impossible. On the positive side….our lighting concept was approved, so we can now quickly move on to DD (design development) and log in the lighting details that we need before it is really too late!

Otherwise, taking a pun on “design and build”, we may well end up doing build and design if the design process can not catch up with the progress on site. Hence my blog title “design as build”  🙂 ….

23. January 2010 by Martin Klaasen
Categories: lighting design | 1 comment

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