Why your facade contractor should be in the room at RIBA Stage 2

There is a pattern that repeats itself on construction programmes across England with uncomfortable regularity.

The facade package is treated as a procurement decision to be made after the structural frame is defined, the floor plates are set and the architectural intent is locked.

The specialist contractor is appointed at Stage 4 or later, handed a set of drawings and asked to price and programme a scope that has been designed without them.

The problems that follow are predictable – buildability issues that could have been resolved in a 20-minute conversation at design stage become formal RFIs, programme delays and variation orders. Fixing something on a drawing costs almost nothing – but fixing it on a live site costs multiples of what the saving appeared to be.

The assumption behind this approach is worth examining, as it treats the facade specialist as an installer — someone who builds what others specify, appointed once the design is settled.

But a specialist contractor who manages the full lifecycle from design through procurement to installation, who works with in-house and external designers and who orders materials to millimetre tolerances is not simply a builder – they are a design resource. Treating them as one from Stage 2 onwards changes what is possible on a project.

Early involvement means attending design team meetings not to price the work but to contribute the kind of knowledge that only comes from having installed hundreds of these systems: which details will perform as specified and which will not, where the thermal bridging risks sit, how a particular junction behaves on site rather than on a drawing.

These are questions that get more expensive the later they are asked. The output does not just have fewer problems – it is better designed and has better procurement.

A specialist involved at design stage produces construction drawings and fabrication details in co-ordination with the design team rather than in response to them. Materials are precisely specified from the outset and the scope that goes to tender is one that can actually be delivered as drawn.

At HKL, we produce approximately 500 design and fabrication drawings every year — every panel, frame and glass unit precisely specified before a single order is placed. Main contractors who engage us early get the benefit of that capability at the stage where it costs least to apply it.

The facade is not a package to be procured late and managed reactively. It is a design discipline – and the results reflect when in the process that is taken seriously.