The Globe and Mail

As many of us learn every New Year, bingeing and too-strict diets are the equally out-of-control flip sides of the same problem. Eat and drink too much, then react to this state of affairs with an impossibly spare regimen out of the latest fad diet. One leads to the other—we learn the hard way—and sensible moderation gets lost in shuffling between one extreme and its opposite. A similar shuttling between bipolar forces is to be found in the world of building and urban development. This is driven by two ideas from the field of construction management that every year shape more and more of our buildings and city-building. These concepts are seldom discussed by the general public, but all of us live with their consequences in the form of bland buildings or heinous construction cost over-runs. The South Beach Diet of the construction world is something called "value engineering (VE)," a construction management technique applied early in the design process, where architectural decisions about the form, layout and embellishment of proposed buildings are interrogated by sharp-pencilled cost consultants. Value engineering is the triumph of accounting and un-imaginative management over architecture and public-mindedness: it values mediocrity and a tilt to the measurable over the meaningful.