The Building in a Box (BiB) product is an ongoing design work at Wilkinson Building Advisors and the affiliated Sustainable Business Building Group.

The BiB product line plans to provide sustainable and energy effective solutions for such business use types as:

1. Commercial offices 
2. Retail 
3. Light industrial

This product line will offer low first cost and operating expense solutions. Features include:

1. High degree of off-site completion using structural integrated exterior panels and mass timber superstructure assemblies
2. A kit of parts shipped to the construction site for superstructure and enclosure assembly
3. Rapid and reliable on-site construction schedules
4. Use of materials and assemblies that are environmentally sustainable including emerging mass timber products
5. Point of use power generation and optional storage systems
6. Advanced indoor climate systems designed workplace safety, productivity and economy of operations

The BiB design and construction team will provide end to end services from early planning to the delivery of a complete and operable building and site. On-board training services will be available to assure that building operations achieve the high degree of energy efficiency built into the design.

As a footnote and for for the reader interested in bigger picture of how to improve productivity in the design and construction industry, here is some suggested reading by the McKinsey Global Institute:

Re-inventing Construction..

BiB engages SIP and CLT systems

The Sustainable Business Building group continues to envision a range of products that engage the structural integrated panels (“SIP”) and cross-laminated timber (“CLT”)

The sustainable commercial office is in the advanced stages of design.

Visible City and MSP real estate studies

Visible City is an applied GIS (Geographic Information Systems) developer and practitioner group.(https://www.visible.city) The Visible City’s team expertise extends across many aspects of planning for the man-built environment including insights into placement of real estate investments.

This post demonstrates several examples. (Visible City is currently collaborating with Wilkinson Building Advisors and the affiliated Sustainable Business Building Group’s Building in a Box initiative). Here are some work product examples.

Historical Access to Transit

“The attached image illustrates locations of individual properties built 50 or more years ago, located within proximity of major existing or planned transit stations in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area. In several of these areas, the transit infrastructure is not yet in service, but the market is moving to account for its future impact. Those parties that incorporate more data into their decision making about operations and investments, stand to extend their competitive advantage.” -Jon Commers http://www.visible.city

Accessibility studies

“Americans increasingly use transportation beyond the single-occupancy vehicle. Transit usage, shared car services, and micro-mobility options like scooters, are moving a growing share of passengers through the nation’s metro areas. Spatial analysis and interpretation can help decision makers understand these patterns in order to reconsider what locations most strongly match their needs of today with contemporary consumer behavior. “

“(Re: suburban car access) The attached image illustrates the area of accessibility for given locations that an organization might compare – existing or prospective sites, or competitor’s locations. The colored “travel-shed” represents the overall area from which a customer could reach the given location within a short period of time. Our approach is not only to establish the travel-shed, but to compare its characteristics – its community profile, its context in terms of building activity, transportation patterns, density of competition, and other metrics customized to a client’s needs and strategy.”-Jon Commers (Visible City’s Managing Principal)http://www.visible.city

The guiding light for Wilkinson Building Advisors is to “Plan thoughtfully and act purposefully.” A pillar of the consulting practice is to help everyone “win” when the project needs fixing. Thus the title of this post: “Fix your project.”

Unfortunately, the need for “fixing” usually arrives after a design and construction project is in the advanced stages, i.e. construction is well underway. By then the “one-time manager” is feeling as though events are getting out of hand. The usual suspects are:

• The financial operations threaten  to break the budget
• The schedule is slipping and the needed opening dates seem unlikely

Wilkinson Building Advisors (“WBA”) is familiar with these types of situations and takes pride in finding solutions that avoid costly disputes in which there are no winners but the lawyers.

In connection with these sorts of matters, WBA does not seek lengthy engagements. Rather, working at the pressure points, the earlier the better, has proven to be the best path to getting the project back on track.

Check in with WBA and arrange for a quick opinion or referral to another expert.

[(disclaimer and attribution) This is not a Wilkinson Building Advisors project or work product. It is a work product by Extreme Panel Technologies, Inc in Cottonwood,MN; 800 977-2635. This image illustrates the concept of off-site fabrication of enclosure systems.]

[Recognition of the designer; Sarah Susanska; Ms. Susanka is an architect and house designer with a reputation arising from the theme of “The Not So Big House.”]

Wilkinson Building Advisors and its working group are planning a new and innovative way of designing, building, and financing environmentally sustainable and affordable small commercial buildings. In some cases, these building and sites will be configured as “Live-Work” environments Because these buildings will be flat packed ship to the the project site, the design has been dubbed: a “Building in a Box” (aka “BiB”). Note the image above

These buildings are designed for very rapid on-site construction and thus limiting the amount of disruption to surrounding facilities; work can often proceed in spite of Minnesota winters,

Read more elsewhere on this site….

Live-Work is not a new idea, but the national pandemic is pushing the idea into the forefront. Here is an interesting link in connection with real Live-Work projects. Wilkinson Building Advisors is coordinating an additional dimension to Live-Work: financing for energy sustainability features. To the extent that the building has a genuine commercial aspect, sources of long term financing are available.

Contact george@wilkinsonadvisors.com for Q+A and information.

:

First a diclaimer..

[(disclaimer and attribution) This is not a Wilkinson Building Advisors project or work product. It is a work product by Extreme Panel Technologies, Inc in Cottonwood,MN; 800 977-2635. This image illustrates the concept of off-site fabrication of enclosure systems.]

[Recognition of the designer; Sarah Susanska; Ms. Susanka is an architect and house designer with a reputation arising from the theme of “The Not So Big House.”]

Then the exciting and sustainable design concept: Building in a Box

Wilkinson Building Advisors and its working group (“Sustainable Building Group”) are planning a new and innovative way of designing, building, and financing environmentally sustainable and affordable small commercial buildings. Because these buildings will be flat pack shipped to the the project site, the design has been dubbed: a “Building in a Box” (aka “BiB”).

The Building in a Box  (“BiB”) product line will engage web-based commerce to rapidly deliver small commercial buildings with the following attributes:

• 3,000-9,000 enclosed square feet
• Your custom design assembled from a predesigned kit-of-parts on your site or our suggested locations
• Competitive first cost with substantial cost of operations advantages
• Lump sum and firm schedule proposals; operational cost estimates
• Rapid construction on your site using a high degree of off-site completion
• GAP financing of high-performance energy sparing features
• A constellation of advanced design and construction features
  • Use of low GWP assemblies and equipment (Global Warming Potential)
  • High performance enclosures systems for the Minnesota weather and low operating costs
  • Point of use power generation (PV solar organic to the architecture) and optional onsite battery storage
  • Advanced, applied building technologies: SIPs (structural integrated panels) and Mass Timber (including cross laminated timber)
  • Interior climate systems with “0” on-site combustion and enhanced filtration
• Site selection guided by advanced GIS (Geographic Information System) analytics when needed to support your business.

The national health crisis (COVID-19) raises specific challenges in connection with building design and construction. These requirements will no doubt be ongoing after the pandemic is brought under control. The systems used in BiB solution will address these issues including indoor air quality and other pathogen spread control features.

Also and in many cases, these designs will yield a “0 carbon footprint” when considering C02 sequestration in the mass timber components, the all-electrical indoor climate system, and the value of the Renewal Energy Credits resulting from the organic solar power generation system.

BiB solutions have an additional benefit due the energy effective nature of the designs: long term financing AND preserving capital for the core mission. All of the BiB designs will engage energy efficiency design and construction to add the incentive of long term financing.

Further, the Sustainable Building Group has is extending its capabilities to include optimal economic geography in the site selection prices (paraphrase: “using realtime data to plan urban investments” -Jon Commers)

Taken together, expert site selection combined with sustainable design yielding low operating expenses will be strategically critical for most businesses.

To learn more, contact…

• Bob Vanney at Vanney Associates, or
• Terry Dieken at Extreme Panel Technologies, or
• Jon Commers at Visible City, or
• George Wilkinson at Wilkinson Building Advisors

More to follow at this post…….

This post is written amid the COVID-19 global pandemic. This tragedy heightens awareness of how small and fragile this globe is and how much sustainability is essential in all matters.

I am a design-builder and see this matter through many layers but in the case of this post, I point out how intertwined solar energy and mass timber are as we all try to invent a future. Perhaps this future rides on the lessons of this spring and summer. Further, improved indoor climate is now critical. Here is a company that is responding: Schadegg Mechanical in St Paul, MN. They are evaluating various ways to improve indoor air quality including bi-polar ionization techniques:

Additionally, the emerging mass timber and CLT design and construction technologies are now coming into their own. They are not the short term, low first cost choice but are the best for the planet in the mid and long term. See my post for a little more.

Lastly, the practical opportunities for what I call “organic solar” energy are passing the traditional financial engineering hurdles thanks to many federal tax law incentives and many programs operated by local serving utilities. In my lingo “organic solar” means photovoltaic solar energy generation systems that are integral to building and site, design and operations. They are best executed by “vertical stacks,: companies that plan, design, build, finance, and sometime own/operate. There are also emerging strategies that apply to retro-fit of existing buildings in addition to the typical roof-mounted solutions.

In other words: in the case of the future, it’s going to be different, like it or not. Sustainable building is inevitably in the mix.

Here are some of my posts on the matter. Note that I have included several in connection with financial management. They don’t attract the “reads” the way the timber and solar do but these actions are critical to turning the corner to feasible in ALL cases.:

Wood and heat pumps old made new again

The choice to build with mass timber

Solar ready checklist

Investors manage your risks

Essay to Owners: start well and save

Forbes on mass timber the path to sustainable construction

There is a reason that Teams is a fast growing platform. It is affordable, has wide application, and its learning curve is relatively flat. It is flat however only if some basic lesson are applied.

1. Find a balance between central and decentralized control; the ability to form a new Team should NOT be controlled by IT but the role should be bestowed on persons who evidence basic understanding of how to use the platform.
2. As in all matters involving standards of practice for an organization, there needs to be an active and informed executive. Advocacy and learning support are critical.
3. Organizational best practices should be supported by some useful templates that define the Teams, Channels, Post, files hierarchy appropriate to the business.
4. The rhythm, frequency of posts to a Team should support common understanding but not get to deep in trivia. Remember, the point is to inform and leave a record for the group (the Team) and not obscure concepts with unnecessary detail.
5. The possibilities of engaging Guests should be fully explored and used where possible. BUT, beware that posts usually go to the entire team. Think carefully about guest selection, they usually get all the posts.
6. Lastly, Teams is about working anywhere at any time the user can get on the internet. The mobile app for the iPhone is very helpful to stay informed.
7. Take some time to learn in the early going. Don’t smother startup with top down controls; guide gently.

I’m a fan of Gini von Courter at LinkedIn Learning, her style helps us all to learn. Here is her current offering for Teams. It is time well spent:

https://www.linkedin.com/learning/microsoft-collaboration-sharepoint-teams-and-groups/collaborate-with-teams-sharepoint-and-groups

Wilkinson Building Advisors is what MicroSoft calls knowledge workers; more than casual users but not developers. If you need to tinker under the hood, contact Craig Yellick at BlueNet: 

cyellick@bluenetinc.com

This post recognizes that MicroSoft Teams (part of the Office 365 platform) is rapidly emerging as a powerful personal and business communication place. At this writing, the costs approaches zero, limited only by the skills of the User group.

For the next 60 days, Wilkinson Building Advisors will offer complimentary phone and web support for any person for business affiliated with the building planning, design, construction, and investment industries. Interested parties are encouraged to respond through this website or to george@wilkinsonadvisors.com.