750
Cost and Time Analysis: Life Cost
752
LIFE COST
752.1
THE PROBLEM OF MEANINGFUL COMPARISONS
The costs of financing, operating, maintaining and altering buildings
usually exceed their first cost. The total long term (forty years) cost of VA
hospitals runs eight to ten times their construction cost. No one denies
that an attempt to reduce first cost to an absolute minimum without regard
to these other long term factors would be false economy. But there are
several difficulties in applying this principle.
First, capital and operating budgets are maintained separately for
administrative purposes, introducing motivations in conflict with trade-off
efforts. Second, capital funds are committed to specific projects so far in
advance that they become severely constrained by escalation of
construction costs. And third, current methods of operations cost
accounting do not readily yield data that can be exclusively assigned to
specific subsystems and components. So, although the various elements
of long term costs are the subjects of considerable individual management
discipline, it has been impossible to optimize their total effect, and
especially difficult to justify higher first cost in terms of potential long-range
savings. The problem of meaningful comparisons is further complicated
by the following difficulties:
1. The Prototype Design developed in this study does not consist of a
specific list of building products. Rather it provides a framework of
coordinated generic subsystem designs within which the VA and the
A/E can derive the optimum detailed design for each specific program,
time and place through a rational process of trade-offs. Cost
projections can only be approximations based on the generic solutions.
2. Actual long term costs will depend to a considerable extent on
geographical and other project-specific factors. For example,
mechanical operating costs will vary with climate, exterior wall design,
building orientation, local utility rates, etc.
3. A major part of the design effort has been on the organization of service
distribution, the provision of convenient access for maintenance, repair
and replacement, and the control of interface conditions for ease of
alteration.
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