A Holistic Design Approach for Ultimate Building and Construction Performance

Abstract

Building a house is a big decision for family. Home construction in Thailand costs around 12,000 to 16,000 baht per square meter. Construction today has many techniques to be applied to building construction. A single house in Thailand mostly constructs with masonry which has a huge amount of dead load in its structure. Many special skilled labors are needed to complete the house such as carpenter, brick builder, aluminum, ceramic tile installer, etc. Therefore, the administration cost is as high as 17 to 20 percents of construction budget. Mostly, contractors take about 8 months for completion of one conventional single house. Compared to the new construction and ecological design techniques, building would take about 3-6 month for the whole construction. The eco-house as a sample for this paper shows that labor cost is only 12-42 person-hours per square meter while conventional house has 124-175 person-hours per square meter. The air condition required in Ecohouseis 63-100 square meters per ton compared to 8-11 square meters per ton for conventional house. The construction budget of eco-house ranges from 10,000 – 16,800 baht per square meter which similar to the cost of conventional one. Finally, the results show that using new construction and ecological design techniques can have a better building performance with the similar construction cost.