NEWSLETTER

BSD Customer Case Study: 
BSD SpecLink Utilized on Award-Winning CHPS Project

Founded in 1986, Quattrocchi Kwok Architects (QKA) provides thoughtful collaborative design services to the clients it serves. QKA offers responsive design work that supports those who use the facilites they create through client-centered design, human scale, innovation, sustainable practices, and the willingness to stretch their commitment to design that responds to use, climate, and the community.

American Canyon High School in Napa, California

With a staff of forty-four, QKA has provided design services for over $900 million of public and private projects. This experience includes master planning, new construction, renovations, and restoration. While QKA’s experience is varied, each project shares a common goal: The facility must meet the needs and wishes of all its users. The public and private clientele of QKA include higher education, public and private schools, community agencies, and commercial projects. The number of repeat clients is a testament to the service and attention QKA gives its projects.

QKA has received numerous awards for its work, the most recent being the 2009 Merit Award for American Canyon High School (ACHS). Designed to meet the District’s Educational Program, ACHS is an environmentally responsible, innovative campus designed to bring a sense of identity to the city of American Canyon. ACHS is one of the first schools approved under the Collaborative for High Performance School (CHPS) verified program.

The Need: QKA believes good resource planning is important to any project. This includes all areas of the project, including specification writing. In 1997 they were using a home-grown office master in a word processing program. Although they felt they were doing reasonably well with their specifiction writing, they felt their process needed improvement. QKA knew there was a better, more proficient way to do things: It was called SpecLink.

The Solution: According to Jon Stong, Project Architect, “SpecLink, including those sections we have previously edited and used, provides a thorough basis for beginning specifications and is a time-saving tool for completing them.” QKA has found that using SpecLink has cut their specification writing time in half and streamlined the process.

The Outcome: The efficiencies gained by switching to SpecLink manifested themselves in many ways. Jon Stong found the following productivity features particularly useful: edit by selection, re-using previous projects without danger of leaving things out, and having the manufacturers' names and web addresses checked frequently. Due to their previous success, QKA chose SpecLink to create the specs on their award winning project American Canyon High School. QKA says it is their best project to date using SpecLink because few sub-contractors challenged the legitimacy of the specifications, and no challenges were based on conflicting or non-existent references.