I can tell you with absolute clarity, that when you find yourself, either as an architect, or a client, being in a position to select your contractor not based on cost but on a host of other considerations, you drink a few beers when making that decision.

Of all the moments on a job, the bid phase gives me the most heartburn. It is a stressful period full of hardcore short-term deadlines and while my personal history tells me that I don’t really have anything to worry about … I still worry.It has been bid central in the office for the last month – a fairly unique situation around these parts. Over the last 10 years or so, we have been doing fewer and fewer competitive bids, seeing a dramatic rise in popularity of the negotiated bid, but we have two really nice commercial jobs (here and here) that are pretty much as the same level of development and both clients wanted to go through the competitive bid process.There are times when I think it would be more productive, and certainly more entertaining, if we were to place all of our qualified contractors into a cage match with a bunch of melee weapons (in our case, these would be calculators, three-ring binders, and notepads) and see who wants to survive the project the most.Competitive bid drawings have to be substantially more complete than if we had gone a negotiated bid route. It only seems fair that if you are going to use the cost of the project as a criterion for selecting the contractor, that the arch...