HOAI / HOA - a simplified guide to Architect's fees in Austria (and Germany) - the Value of Innovation (IV).

Innovation Part IV: In the beginning client and architect have to reach an agreement on the level of difficulty:

(1-10): from a maybe simple shelter (level one) to a social housing project (level five), a railway-station or an hospital (level seven) to finally special buildings which need specialised knowledge (level 10).

Next the architect (or a commissioned consultant) has to estimate the gross building costs - and that's the tricky part. Usually you do it by counting surfaces /volumes of building parts and multiplying them by cost schedules, predicting the required mechanical/ electrical/ plumbing work (can be already 40% of the total costs) and having a feasible structural design, etc. Lucky you if you have an optimized work flow (or software) for this (usually it's done by drawingpolylines in AutoCad, counting them and add the values to Excel spreadsheets).

Knowing the level of difficulty and the estimate building costs the architect can pick the fee rate accordant the following list:

Finally we can estimate the architect's fee by using this formula:

H_P = K x h_P x t

(K..the cost estimation, h_P..fee rate, t..proportion of design phases)

And remember - no deal without a special discount. As mentioned in one of the last posts 't' is affecting your fee if you're "only" the design-architect. In this case you don't gain much of the project's fees.

I imagine that elsewhere architect's fee are regulated more or less the same way:

Do the building costs really reflect the value of design achievements? Does it encourage good architecture? Does it award sustainable designs? And most important: Does it boosts innovation?