Bridging Delivery Method
A hybrid delivery approach where the owner hires a design firm to develop plans to roughly 30 to 60 percent completion, the bridging documents, then bids that partial design out to [[concept-design-build|design-build]] teams who complete the design and construct the project, giving the owner more design control than pure design-build while keeping single-point responsibility for the rest.
Why it matters
The bridging documents' actual completeness at handoff determines how much ambiguity the design-build team inherits, an owner who stops the bridging design too early is really just moving that ambiguity, and its cost, onto whoever wins the design-build bid.
On a real project
An owner's design firm develops bridging documents to about 40 percent completion, establishing the building's layout and major systems, then bids that package to design-build teams who complete the detailed design and construction.
Who this matters most to
An Owner's Representative manages the bridging design phase and its handoff, making sure the documents are complete enough that the design-build team isn't left guessing at the owner's real intent.
Where this goes wrong
Bridging documents are handed off with several ambiguous or unresolved details left for "design-build to figure out," and the design-build team interprets those gaps differently than the owner actually intended. A dispute follows over whether the resulting design was really included in the guaranteed price.