A building enclosure designer's and consultant's involvement in the field may happen in two distinct phases: during the construction (construction monitoring) and afterwards (forensic investigation).

This section of the webpage is intended to present construction defects as well as architectural errors and omissions observed during the construction monitoring, undertaken as part of field quality control.

A separate section is dedicated to building failures that presents failures observed during forensic investigations. There would also be two separate sections devoted to the design: the design errors and omissions found in architectural drawings and in submittals in the future.

 

The construction observer should have a sensitive eye, identifying most building defects simply by watching. This skill may make one's life distasteful and indirectly aggravate the lives of others, like a history buff instantly picking and loudly commenting each goof while watching a movie. There is no joy in life when eye always meets a defect.

 

A QC inspector is the messenger who brings bad news on the job site followed by inevitable delays and expenses. Since the times immemorial people had a tendency to kill the harbingers of bad news. Kaz was once attacked by a foreman of bricklayers, who hit him and attempted to push him off a scaffold after Kaz explained a workmanship deficiency in the brick veneer installed by the foreman's crew. The strategy worked; the deficiency was never remediated.

 

It takes a good architect to predict all real construction site conditions and create a truly foolproof design. It takes hard work and a good deal of invention to create a really good design and this skill usually remains unrewarded, as the modern architecture departed from technology. More often than not we are presented with a patchwork design and a patchwork construction. The owner needs a really good quality control to pick and remediate the areas where holes in the patchwork overlap.

 

Nobody profits from a professional report filed when the condition is already concealed and closed. This is why these conditions were reported directly to the respective contractors in anticipation of immediate remediation.

 

Here is the slideshow of the 491-497 Greenwich Street project.

 

Here is the slideshow of the Goldman Sachs project.