Originally Posted by
ik9000
I disagree, and would caution against trying to generalise here. Most things are designed in an office and built elsewhere. That is the nature of construction, and one does not simply prototype a building. The panels are tested to industry standards, and the design application based on the performance values can be readily applied. NB that the design was varied later on site for cost-saving reasons (according to one article I read, and no I can't give a source now). Either way, no amount of sound design can deal with the muppet on site not installing the firestop properly. That is a workmanship issue, and prototyping also would not have picked that up. This is where my earlier comments on lack-of clerk-of-works roles and resident engineer/resident architect come in - those roles traditionally would have been detecting such problems BEFORE they could be concealed and viewing prevented ahead of the monthly walkover.
If you really want to politicise this then go back to Thatcher's abolotion of the standard fee scales that were "anti-competitive" and so created the pressure to race-to-the-bottom on fees and under resource projects financially. The only people who benefited were the rich corporate clients. Computer tech helped the industry weather some of the storm, but each recession there is a leap down in fees and they never recover before the next one hits. So roles get cut, from every side: design office, on site, at the contractor's end, at the council and building control offices, etc etc. There needs to be a reality check about the true cost of construction, and clients need to start to accept that bargain basement fees cannot be sustained. IMO there needs to be a shift back towards accepting costs need to be higher, so the right people get employed again (and given time to do their jobs to 100% thoroughness instead of 75% while rushed, harried and constantly doing unpaid overtime off their own backs). That's not to say people are cutting corners, but that the ability for a design architect/engineer to spend all day on a site to inspect every single location just isn't there, so they can't do it. And there's no RE/RA/CoW, so who does it? The contractor? In theory, but that assumes the site team is big enough, and as we can see from the errors highlighted by BRE, that didn't work so well...