Architect–BPS consultant collaborations: <italic>Harmony or hardship?</italic>: Fid-Bau Portal

Architect–BPS consultant collaborations: Harmony or hardship?

Alsaadani, Sara / Bleil De Souza, Clarice

Multi-disciplinary collaboration is considered necessary for solving complex designs, and belief in its merits is unequivocal in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) literature. However, this paper argues that collaboration is a challenging endeavour that entails creating a unified platform for professionals to converge. Challenges are compounded when the collaboration is for building performance assessments, as architects’ and Building Performance Simulation (BPS) consultants’ worldviews are divergent. This paper presents part of a mixed-methods study investigating collaborative relationships between architects and BPS consultants. Questionnaires are designed to re-test non-technical barriers in collaboration, described during preceding interviews. Six salient factors representing barriers impeding fruitful collaborations are extracted, and inter-relationships are explored using inferential statistics. Barriers include perceptions about architects’ attitudes toward BPS, using BPS for compliance, trust and communication between architects and consultants. Finally, this research illustrates how recourse to methodologies from outside the traditional BPS realm may open new research avenues in this field.