ABSTRACT

Design and build is a procurement method that has been in use for a long time. The process is found in many industries. When somebody buys something, the usual process seems to be to buy a product that has been designed by its producer. Examples of this are found in fields as diverse as shipbuilding and microelectronics. Indeed, before the emergence of architecture as a profession distinct from fabrication, pre-industrial society used to procure buildings by a process of design and build. It was the separation of responsibility for fabrication from responsibility for design that led to the emergence of so-called traditional general contracting in the nineteenth century. This separation of design from construction in the building industry has, for a long time, been the source of many problems (Murray and Langford 2003), and remains so.