by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: David Harris, FAIA, is the retiring president of the National Institute of Building Sciences in Washington, D.C., where he has worked for nearly 28 years. Early in his career, Harris spent four years in the Navy’s Civil Engineer Corps. After serving two overseas tours in a Navy Construction Battalion in Okinawa and Vietnam, he worked for two years managing construction contracts on a Marine Corps Air Base in North Carolina, where he gained valuable experience in leadership and management and a helpful understanding of the magnitude and complexity of the military construction program. After leaving the Navy, Harris worked for several D.C. firms including Chloethiel Woodard Smith, Eddie Weihe, Arthur Cotton Moore, and HDR before joining the NIBS staff in 1980.

Education: BArch from Kent State University.

Current read: Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Favorite D.C. landmark: Although the many national landmarks—the Capitol, the monuments, the White House—are always exciting, especially when landing at National Airport on a clear night, one of my favorite “off the beaten track” buildings is the German Embassy on Reservoir Road in a quiet D.C. residential area. The building is nicely settled into the neighborhood and fits the site very well. Although a substantial facility, it doesn’t dominate the community.

NIBS’ mission and it evolution: Officially, the NIBS vision is a better built environment, and its mission is to serve the nation and the public interest by supporting advances in building science and technology to improve the built environment.

Although many of the problems cited in the NIBS legislation have been addressed with the broad adoption of the International Code Council’s I-Codes and ICC’s support programs, there remains much work to do to reduce the many unnecessary amendments to these model codes when enacted by state and local governments. Coincidentally, many of the building product and material approval issues included in the NIBS authorizing legislation have also been addressed by programs of the International Code Council. As a result, NIBS has evolved into a kind of applied research organization that serves the building community through multi-disciplinary initiatives to develop more effective and workable building criteria through which to improve buildings and the building process. NIBS has settled into three distinct but related program areas: natural hazards mitigation, information technology and facility performance, and sustainability.

Why did you become involved with NIBS?
After working on a variety of buildings in many jurisdictions over the years, I became interested in reducing the impact and inefficiencies that affect our profession due to the regulatory differences applied when one crosses a jurisdictional boundary. Then, there were significant differences in building codes from one jurisdiction to another, even in the same state. There were conflicts, too, in requirements of fire marshals and code officials regarding egress and other issues. While this all was accepted as a part of doing business, it adds cost and time to building buildings.

An architect friend told me about a staff opening at NIBS and about NIBS’ mission. Looking back, my joining NIBS almost seems like destiny because it has been such a good fit with my areas of interest. And the principal of the firm I first worked for when I came to D.C., Chloethiel Smith, FAIA, was one of two architects on the Douglass Commission, the body that recommended the formation of NIBS in 1968, which, coincidentally, was the year I came to Washington.

What is your proudest achievement at NIBS?
Wow, that’s like asking which of your many children you love the most! Let me mention just two. In 1985, two savvy construction executives from the Navy and the Army came to NIBS to solve a criteria management problem that had evolved since the 1950s. Those two agencies, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Naval Facilities Engineering Command, put billions of dollars of construction in place annually. Their paper-based criteria management and dissemination system had become a serious problem. An A/E hired to design a facility for them would receive three 50-pound boxes of publications a few months after they were selected. These documents were un-indexed, sometimes unreadable, often out of date or missing.

This “system” had become a paper mess that was affecting the schedules, quality, and costs of these agencies’ projects. With their support, NIBS developed a CD-ROM-based dissemination system called the Construction Criteria Base (CCB) that solved the problem. It was the building industry’s first CD-ROM. Over the ensuing 20 years, CCB evolved into a DVD-based program, then into today’s Internet-based Whole Building Design Guide. This program is important for two reasons. First, it got NIBS involved in building-related information technology. Second, and infinitely more important to our industry, it triggered the consolidation of federal agency-specific design and construction criteria into today’s federal interagency-wide criteria program, which is easier to maintain, disseminate, and use.

The other is to help federal agencies like FEMA use the model building codes and voluntary standards to help achieve their missions. FEMA and several others like HUD, EPA, the Access Board, and DOE have effectively and cooperatively used the model codes to achieve natural hazard mitigation, energy conservation, improved accessibility, and other important objectives. NIBS volunteers have been involved with many of these programs. It well demonstrates the benefits of cooperation between the federal government and the private sector.

What is the greatest opportunity that technology has brought to the architecture profession during your tenure?
I believe the computer has been a tremendous help in improving the productivity and efficiency of our profession and the entire building industry, and we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. Building information modeling (BIM) will allow architects and other designers to explore many design alternatives and assess the performance and cost of each in a fraction of the time such services to our clients would have taken a couple of decades ago. I view building information models today as fairly simple, 3-D CAD models. We are just now starting to imagine the true potential of sophisticated building information models. Can you imagine the ability to click on a component of a design and instantly have access to the full performance attributes of an elevator, including design details, cost, schedule, related service needs, maintenance requirements, service life, code compliance, optional finishes, capacity, speed, loads, security, and the like? More importantly, those data will be in formats that allow the designer, contractor, and owner to effectively and efficiently use and share them with others involved with the facility’s life cycle—such as regulators and first responders.

It is important to note that the overall mission here is to improve the performance of buildings, not just move and use information more efficiently. This leads to what I believe will be the most important and valuable program NIBS has undertaken: the development of high-performance building standards. Nearly 100 standards writing organizations, federal agencies, and professional associations—including the AIA—have come together to form the High Performance Buildings Council at NIBS to lead a long-term effort to develop high-performance building standards. The use of BIM to analyze accurately can demonstrate to building owners the value of high-performance standards. Areas such as energy efficiency, security, productivity, aesthetics, and cost can be assessed through modeling software to provide architects with better information with which to knowingly advise their clients as to the ROI for added insulation, a longer-lasting roofing system, and the like. This is really exciting stuff!

Where is NBIMS in development now?
Version 1, Part 1 of the National Building Information Modeling Standard was released last December. It provides the structure and foundation for a series of modules for a complex structure of modules that will organize and set the data structure and format for the performance of our future building products, materials, systems, whole buildings, campuses, constructed infrastructure, and processes across the full life-cycle of buildings. Thus, even though it is just the virtual “outline” of the standard, it is more than 182 pages and 9 MB.

With this as a start, the real work is just beginning. Under the leadership of Deke Smith, FAIA, executive director of NIBS buildingSMART Alliance; Alan Edgar, Assoc. AIA, chairman of the NBIMS Project Committee; and Tom Gay, chairman of the Alliance, the next phase of NBIMS is to enlist the participation of our industry’s professional associations, government, and the private sector to develop the many modules that will add meat to the skeleton to provide the comprehensive standard that is needed. As these substantive components are added, subsequent versions of the standard will be published.

One such module is already under way for precast concrete, thanks to grants from the Pankow Foundation. The ICC is hard at work on its SMARTcodes™ project being led by Dave Conover. NIBS’ work in this effort will be to coordinate and provide support and resources to help make sure the standard meets the overall objective: the effective organization, transfer, and use of information and data in our increasingly complex facility design, construction, and operation processes.

Status of the CEO search: The Board Search Committee, chaired by 2000 AIA President Ron Skaggs, FAIA, has done an excellent job in finding outstanding candidates to be interviewed by the NIBS Board next month. I believe any of the finalists will do an excellent job at leading NIBS staff, working cooperatively with the Board and NIBS clients and volunteers to significantly advance NIBS’ ability to address the important and difficult issues facing the nation’s building process.

What challenges do you foresee for the new CEO when selected?
There are three key needs here. The first is to maintain the integrity of the institute. All of us at NIBS have worked very hard to ensure that NIBS first and foremost works to serve the public interest. As NIBS takes on more and more difficult and important building process issues like NBIMS and high-performance buildings standards, we must remember to mesh the technical work with the public needs and the public’s trust.

Second, the broad-based funding sources we’ve been able to build must be maintained and others developed. The federal agencies have been excellent clients, and I believe NIBS has served them well by developing solutions to agency needs and problems that well serve the public and the private sector, too. The Whole Building Design Guide is an excellent example of this. We need to find ways to better draw upon the private sector for funding and other resources like knowledgeable and committed volunteers.

Third, the excellent NIBS staff is a vital component of the foundation of NIBS’ successful contributions to our industry. I’ve been so very fortunate to work with so many dedicated and talented colleagues and friends. I have the highest respect and appreciation for my fellow staff officers at NIBS and the entire staff. They’re just terrific!