African Design Magazine May 2016 | Page 86

Architects Profile SVA International Cape Town International Convention Centre, South Africa Long Beach Resort, Mauritius In addition, Hamilton said SVA was now able to offer a multi-disciplinary approach to its in-house design-led services, which made project coordination much easier and resulted in significant time savings. “The new digital technology enables all roleplayers involved in a project to work on the same technical platforms and log their activity on a shared production interface. We are able to consider a much wider range of options and include inputs from all the parties simultaneously. The possibility of integrating in real time the variety of inputs that inform design is being practiced in many fields already, and will be the discerning distinction of the architectural office of the future.” He said his company had been impelled to keep pace with ever-improving production technologies in an effort to work faster and more efficiently in delivering a turnkey service to clients in the commercial and public sectors. “It all comes down to scale. Not just of the buildings we are able to produce but also the timeframes in which we are able to create them and the size of the teams required to do so,” said Hamilton. Structures that took three years and a team of 10 to design and build a decade ago are now being completed in less than a third of that time by one or two architects, he said, with reduced margins being passed on to clients. “The next 10 years will see even further efficiencies and effectively make the way we do things now obsolete. Among these changes will be the simultaneous capture of all inputs from our team and any consulting professionals on a project, which will streamline both the timing and associated costs to clients.” A second-generation architect, the 53-year-old Hamilton has seen many social and technological changes first-hand but, he said, SVA International’s on-going challenge was to keep pace with the ever-increasing speed of contin [