Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities

As a workplace disaster, the L'Ambiance Plaza building collapse triggered an investigation conducted by OSHA with the technical assistance of the National Bureau of Standards. Following the investigation, OSHA charged several contractors with violations and levied the highest fines in its history. In addition, the matter was referred to the U.S. Department of Justice for consideration of possible criminal prosecution. Not long after the collapse occurred, however, a joint federal and state judicial mediation panel began to explore the possibility of a “global” settlement of all L'Ambiance Plaza‐related lawsuits. The central goal of that effort was to provide as large a settlement fund as possible for victims and their families, without protracted litigation. OSHA eventually became involved in this process, and ultimately reached a mediated resolution of its claims as part of a package that settled all disputes arising from the collapse.

The subject of project peer review of structural design was a major topic of discussion at both the 1983 Santa Barbara Engineering Foundation conference, Building Structural Failures—Their Cause and Prevention, and the 1987 follow‐up conference in Palm Coast, Florida, Structural Failures II. The deliberations of the Palm Coast conference regarding project peer review, which are the subject of this paper, resulted in the very significant recommendation that peer review of projects over a certain threshold level be made mandatory through incorporation into code provisions or by requirements of regulating authorities, and that the cost of such reviews should be borne by the owner. Several questions remain regarding the criteria and procedures of such a review, such as the threshold limits for projects that should be subject to review, the scope of the review, the liability of the reviewer, and the timing of the review. A joint committee of the ASCE and the American Consulting Engineers Council (ACEC) is working to define such criteria and procedures.

Unified risk insurance is a transfer‐of‐risk mechanism. It permits building owners and the construction team to transfer exposure from major construction deficiencies and defects to an insurance entity. Currently, the insurance industry accepts such responsibility through liability‐insurance policies. A more appropriate vehicle for risk transfer seems to be the property approach. The costs associated with the litigation process provide too great a financial risk to continue resolving disputes within the litigation framework. The combined resources of the construction industry and the insurance industry, working in harmony to resolve details for the construction of such a plan, are required. The practicality of such an insurance approach for construction is underlined by successful programs in Europe. The Decennale liability approach covers latent‐defect risk on construction projects in France for 10 years. The British have been experimenting with such protections, and in 1988 published a significant report that advocated the use of “Building Users' Insurance against Latent Defects” (which was the report's title). The concepts contained in these three approaches to a practical insurance program are discussed in the present paper.

Performance evaluation of built facilities has traditionally reflected a product/hardware bias, and has been primarily concerned with the performance measurement of building subsystems. There are two shortcomings of this approach: First, the implied assumption that a building's performance is equal to the aggregated performance of its components is not valid. A completed building, like most complex systems is much more than the sum of its parts. Second, and much more importantly, the focus of performance appraisal on individual subsystems ignores the interdependencies among them. As a result, this second assumption actively encourages suboptimization of parts at the expense of the whole product, namely, the building. To overcome these shortcomings, an organizationally sensitive performance‐evaluation model is proposed that recommends an overall performance evaluation of the building process as a function of the well‐being of its task organizations.

A tall reinforced‐concrete grain silo collapsed suddenly on a sunny, windless, day in the Midwest. Field observations and analysis showed that failure of the suspended steel hopper triggered the collapse. Attachment of the suspended hopper to the concrete wall of the silo had been designed awkwardly and was subject to substantial overstressing in service. The quality of fabrication and welding of the various components for the hopper‐supporting system was poor. The question of why it took four years of service before the silo collapsed but an adjacent, twin, silo remained standing, is answered. Design of the strengthening required for the remaining twin silo is also described. Advice to designers of suspended hoppers is also given at length.