use cases
Protea represents the inevitable evolution of capital planning and cost estimating.
At the heart of every construction project is a continuous cost modeling exercise to reconcile the designer’s vision, and the owner’s space need, with the project budget.
Until now, cost modeling has been delivered by specialized consultants, and while the evidence is overwhelming that cost modeling in general delivers optimal outcomes, it has been a type of service that is difficult to find, is expensive, and can be time consuming.
PROTEA puts the cost modeling capabilities that were only available to specialists in the hands of designers and owners, so that they can more efficiently and effectively design and build the best building for their money – in real time.
Project pursuit
A design firm uses PROTEA to avoid pursuing suboptimal projects and wins the bid of a better fitting project.
DESIGN-BUILD
A builder pursuing a design-build delivery method avoids redesign feedback loops.
UNIVERSITY PLANNING
A design team generates multiple planning scenarios in response to rapidly changing requirements.
design charette
An owner and design team evalutes numerous combinations of parameters and makes tradeoffs in real time to rapidly reach consensus.
Project Pursuit
An architect was pursuing a complex project with an imminent deadline and the design firm wanted to avoid spending significant amounts of their time and money designing for a pursuit, only to discover at the end of the process that the cost of their design might exceed the advertised budget.
PROTEA enabled the design firm to rapidly model building parameters to confirm that their designs would fall within the advertised budget before spending any time or money on developing 3D models. This delivered a significant amount of savings and helped the design firm win the project.
DESIGN-BUILD: PLANNING AND DESIGN
A builder using a design-build delivery method was moving from developing a tabular space program into design without pre-determining the likely costs for their designs or testing options along the way. The design team was concerned about spending a significant amount of time and money during early design phases only for the designer and owner to discover at the conclusion that the cost of their design exceeds budget, and they wanted to avoid a time-consuming and expensive redesign feedback loop.
Using PROTEA, the design-build team and owner rapidly modeled building parameters in a real-time environment – evaluating different combinations, permutations, and options in order to arrive at an optimized parametric building model that fell within the owner’s budget, thereby avoiding spending extra time and money developing design models.
UNIVERSITY PLANNING
Routinely, architects spend significant amounts of their time and money designing for a pursuit, only to discover at the end of the process that the cost of their design exceeds the advertised budget.
PROTEA enabled a design team to rapidly model building parameters to confirm that their designs will fall within the advertised budget before spending any time or money on developing 3D models. This delivered a significant amount of savings to the design firm and lowers barriers to entry for pursuing new work.
DESIGN CHARETTE
A design firm was working with the project owner on the programming and conceptual design of a new laboratory facility. The design team and owner engaged in a design charette to decide upon the facility location, space program, building systems, building geometry, aesthetics, sustainability goals and whether the choices they were making would fall within budget.
Using PROTEA’s cost modeling software, the designer and owner rapidly evaluated numerous combinations of these parameters, considered options, made tradeoffs among parameters, in real time, and left the charette with a common understanding of the choices that were made and the cost profile of the building they were designing.