Failure and Documentation of Building Structures

In recent years, a number of structural failures have occurred in buildings in Denmark, trigging a debate on safety and reliability in the built environment in general. In this context, the quality of the documentation of the capacity and functionality of building structures has been criticised and a common understanding of content and quality assurance of the documentation of load bearing building structures has been identified. Based on experience from the Danish building industry as well as guidelines published by the Danish Building Research Institute, the paper discusses the outline and control of documentation of load-bearing building structures. The qualitative analysis includes the content of individual parts of the documentation. A distinction between the documentation of the physical structures and the documentation of the design process is introduced. Furthermore, the organisation of the design process and tasks related to the individual parts of the documentation are discussed both regarding the engineer in charge of the main design and for the individual engineering tasks for all elements of the structure, including drawings and structural calculations. Finally, the paper discusses a set of information and document management issues of critical importance for the resulting safety of the documented load-bearing structures; e.g. how to administer, document, identify and draw up the individual parts of the documentation; especially how to incorporate results from digital modelling and simulation of structural behaviour into the documentation. It is concluded that an industry standard is necessary in order to maintain the safety levels of load-bearing building structures in the future.