Quote for the week

“The architect’s two most important tools are: the eraser in the drafting room and the wrecking bar on the site.” Attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright by his client and friend, Herbert Jacobs, in the biographical work, Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s greatest architect. You can read how the quote morphed over time here, which tells how FLW would knock walls down, and have bricks thrown at him.

Construction Quality

Costs and quality in construction are under the spotlight. 2213 building companies declared bankruptcy in the last financial year in Australia, up 72% from the year before. Most of these were attributed to the rise in materials and labour costs for companies who had signed fixed price contracts in the years before when rates were lower. Two issues spring to mind.

Firstly, tendering is a scourge on quality in the industry – lowest price usually wins, and invariably it is too low, and something has to give, inevitably quality. Subbies are pressured to lower their costs, and then pressured further to return to a job they lost money on, to repair defects. The end process is a s**tfight to get something approximating the intended finish. Or the builder folds.

Secondly, that’s a lot of bankruptcies even before the cost increases. On average building firms are 25% of all company bankruptcies for an industry that is only 10% of GDP. What that means is that intended bankruptcy, to avoid being held accountable for construction defects, has become industry practice. Once the final, or penultimate, payment is made, the company declares they are broke, and all those defects never get fixed.

The cure is easy, and totally unpalatable. Only sign with a contractor that has had a sole company for all their projects. And then only sign a contract based on realistic rates: either a negotiated contract against a QS estimate, or an open book tender, or a quantum meruit (do and charge) contract as the last resort.

None of that is happening on most sites soon, and there is even more to worry about.

Bad materials / bad working?

Engineered stone is the new asbestos. Except that it’s not. There was no safe method for mining, making or using asbestos. But there is for engineered stone: its highly controlled manufacture is not in question, it is the making, specifically the cutting, that is at issue. The makers argue that if it is wet cut, with proper dust extraction and masks worn then it poses no issue, any more than the need to wear welding goggles / helmet, or ear / eye protection in timber work.

But there have been years of cowboys in the industry, dry cutting in enclosed sheds, and cutting without protection on site. The image above is of a small fabricator that I used twenty years ago to make some prototype joinery pieces. You can see the dry cutting, with no safety features, common then, and still. The white dots in the image are dust particles captured in the photo. Scary.

Building unions are calling for an immediate ban, citing deaths and injuries. That is strongly resisted by the industry, who argue that the deaths and injuries have been a result of negligence. The issue is getting very heated; is the baby being thrown out with the bath water? The answer is not clear, with the states resisting any more controls, at least for now.

Bad building / terrible building

How bad is the worst of domestic construction? One hilarious and depressing way to find out is to follow Zeher Khalil, a building inspector with the website Home Run. Known as ‘the TikTok inspector’ he makes videos of his inspections, pointing out alarmingly poor construction work, some of the defects are truly frightening. But most of his work is chasing the horse after it's bolted.

A brilliant solution

Another building inspector is Jerry Tyrrell, who takes a different approach. He started as a labourer in 1972, trained as an architect, inspected his first building for a buyer in 1976, and founded Tyrrells Property Inspections with his brother twin brother Tim, a construction lawyer.

His life’s work in one sentence: "150,000 building inspections later, I’m sick of reporting defects everyone spends a fortune fixing - cutting out decayed ends of weatherboards, replacing rusty steel, endless legal and expert costs or taking responsibility for manufacturers’ faulty products such as plywood backed flooring or external timber doors”

Along the way he changed our industry forever by getting rid of termiticides and untreated structural timbers in the late 1990s. He spent the last ten years, and north of $10m, taking preemptive action to improve standards by creating a visual version of the Building Code of Australia (BCA), called Tools^TM.

The BCA is an admirable document, we have some of the most stringent standards in the world, BUT it is a word-based document in a visually based industry, and poorly worded in quasi legalese at that. Taken together with more than 70% of people on a building site not having English as their first language, there are endless possibilities for failure.

Starting with a single image of a building, one can interrogate the website down to find out every possible issue in a building, all tagged with the appropriate chapter and verse of the building code and Australian standards. You can read more about Tools^TM in A&D here.

Bookends

Every Design Notes has a ‘Bookends’ highlighting two books from opposite ends of a shelf. But this week something different to celebrate the impact of digital over paper, at least on building sites. So many contractors and subbies now carry digital pads (Apple iPad) on sites, allowing them to access the current drawings, often curated by programs such as Procore, Aconex and Omtrack.

Which makes it even more curious that the NSW Building Commissioner is demanding that paper copies be held in a site office. We know that he wants building to return to ‘old school’ ways, as a means of improving quality, which by and large we applaud, but on this matter, he is out-of-time.

Signs off

The Fresh Food and Dining Opportunities at the new Sydney Fish market will be slightly delayed while the collapsed crane (with Multiplex sign) is removed. Two workers were injured, but it could have been a lot worse, in the second most dangerous industry in Australia.

Next week

Rising to the housing planning challenge?

Tone Wheeler is an architect /adjunct prof UNSW / president AAA

The views expressed are his.

These Design Notes are Tone on Tuesday #186.

Past Tone on Tuesday columns can be found here

Past A&D Another Thing columns can be found here

You can contact TW at [email protected]