Building envelope commissioning ensures long-term performance of a building’s most critical and liability-prone components. A general contractor could, conceivably, resist this process on the assumption that it creates more work, impacts the schedule and increases cost. However, while these may be true, the advantages significantly outweigh the costs and greatly benefit the GC, all which will be examined throughout this article.
The NIBS Guideline 3-2012: Building Enclosure Commissioning Process identifies building enclosure performance as a team sport that needs to be carefully planned and monitored from the project’s beginning and at each step of the building process. It offers the owner and the owners’ design representatives a framework to manage the processes that facilitate the successful performance of the building enclosure. [1]