Our Services include design and general construction, or we can mix and match, including:

   • Design with construction assist
   • Construction with design assist
 

Any way you slice it, our services include practical innovation and unparalleled technical competence.

DESIGN

As an architect with 21 years of experience building large, complex mixed use and multifamily projects for major clients, including Pulte, Lennar, Standard Pacific Homes, and Legacy Partners, with a fanatical drive for quality, we know what works and what doesn’t. Equally important, we know what our designs cost to build and how to keep our projects within budget. Although our designs are Pre-Value Engineered_® using our construction experience, they are created with the practical innovation and the award-winning talent of our chief design architect, Henry Tong. Our unparalleled technical competence has been developed from thousands of hours in the trenches, dealing with third party design and detail issues, while building complex Class A multifamily and mixed use projects. No other multifamily architect we are aware of has had our bottom line responsibility to make it work in the trenches.

CONSTRUCTION ASSIST

Specifications are a legal tripping hazard. Most specification writers don’t fully understand what they are specifying and practically none of the subcontractors purchasing and installing the products do either. The cut and paste practice required by specification writing systems insures that every specification will have conflicts. Further, most specification writing systems have been developed for public work which must allow for open bidding of products, creating complex specifications frequently referring to out-of-date standards and regulations, many of which can not be fully met with commercially available products. In addition, specifications break up the work by industry classification systems, not by trade jurisdiction, creating the opportunity for missed trade work. To create clarity without conflict and avoid the tripping hazards with specifications that can not be met and to insure all of the required work is contracted for, the trade contracts need to specify products and manufacturers that have a history of performance and recognized industry standards for site manufactured products. In addition to this proprietary specification process, our purchasing department has years of lessons with trade work jurisdictions and industry practice with respect to work that is needed for a complete job, including products not detailed in most plans. We can write your trade contracts for you, or better yet, write and negotiate them for you to insure all the processes and requirements are in place.

We have by far the most in-depth and structured quality control program of any multifamily/mixed use general contractor we are aware of. This quality control service is available as an extension of our architecture-only service. If projects end up in a lawsuit dealing with quality, the questions are what was, or should have been required, and what was, or should have been performed. Without control of plans and trade contracts, the effectiveness of quality control is greatly hampered. Where we are doing both, and there is clear and complete follow-through from supervision, we can be very effective in minimizing risk, producing a final product that feels and looks like quality, and perform as expected.

Our fully integrated program includes our state of the art scheduling. Not only do our schedules reflect our understanding of how buildings go together, with all their pieces structured in a sequential process that results in an even flow of work, all our schedules are fully cost loaded. We achieve this by integrating the line items in our trade schedule of values, which is the vehicle for subcontractor payment, into the construction schedule as separate line items. This not only simplifies the payment process, it focuses trade constructors' attention on the schedule as a vehicle to manage their cash flow. We know of no other company that has developed this ability to manage schedule and cost within the same vehicle.

DESIGN / BUILD

Design/build is the most efficient and cost effective approach to multifamily and mixed use project acquisition. The greatest opportunity for savings in any project is at the design concept stage. Our process of design/build moves value engineering from the backend, where substitutions of less expensive materials and equipment is the only opportunity for savings, to the front, where we can develop the design from concept in the most efficient way, allowing us to achieve the greatest savings. This is our proprietary process of Pre-Value Engineered_®  architecture. We achieve further efficiencies with our inside-out design process which involves developing and refining our unit designs first, then assembling the units into buildings. This allows us to optimize each of the elements within the unit and then, with a high degree of repetition of the same units, we can further optimize efficiency and cost. The units cost ultimately becomes the major factor in project cost in a multifamily project with large numbers of units. In contrast, the traditional design process used by most every other architect is outside-in. This process involves creating the mass first, than cutting up the space into units. This process usually results in a large number of unit types and inefficient use of materials, as many of the cut-up units don’t allow the use of materials in their optimum configurations. Costs are almost always higher with the outside-in design process.

DESIGN ASSIST

Where we have been retained as a general contractor at the beginning of the design process, our design assist program involves working hand-in-hand with the owner’s architect to provide cost advice, at each step of the process. To help avoid the project becoming over budget, we provide budgets and cost updates at critical stages and make recommendations on alternatives to save cost. In this role we can also employ  design/build subcontractors for mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems, and for parking garages, which can result in additional savings.

GENERAL CONSTRUCTION

We have built repeat projects for sixty percent of our clients. We believe the best way to describe our general construction service is through the words of one of our clients, for whom we are currently completing a very complex, $75,000,000 mixed use project:

“This Project is the fifth largest bearing steel stud to be built in Los Angeles. The four previous projects all had significant time and cost overruns due to the technical complexities and methods of construction utilized in this new framing system. This Project is the most complicated of the five and through the efforts of ACCI and your subcontractors, you have managed to keep the Project on schedule and within budget…”

“Of equal significance is American’s technical knowledge, most notably displayed through their proactive design assist and preconstruction role. This is the most detailed and rigorous I have seen. It is assuring to know that with the thousands of details in the $75,000,000 technically complex Miracle Mile project that ACCI is proactively into every detail, demanding a level of quality perfection I have not seen in my 30 years of experience.”

“The Legacy at Studio City Project was a financial success and has won a number of architectural awards, which ACCI previously built for Legacy Partners, and Miracle Mile is certainly on track to raise the bar for success.”

Copyright © 2010 American Multifamily, Inc.