Precisely because the people who know what to do the first time around are not in-house. So you get a first push where they try to be quick and efficient, don't really know what the issues they're going to face are, and then 3 years in there's a complaint about a frog and they need to spend a million dollars on an expert to tell them "don't build it where the frog lives." It's penny wise pound foolish.

Yes you can. It requires two things:

1) you need to hire a builder who has experience with commercial and/or industrial construction. Hire the same type of builder that you wanted to build a small dental clinic. Tell them explicitly that you want everything to build built with the same standards as their commercial clients. Even if they are well intentioned, you don't want to be the beta tester for a builder trying to expand in a new type of construction. Most of the work will also be done by subcontractors, so you want to hire someone with a list of contacts filled with companies who typically do high quality work for highly demanding client.

2) Hire a structural engineer and architect to check their work. If you can only hire one, the engineer is more important, a shitty finish material or bad interior lightning is easier to fix than a cracked foundation. The engineer needs to be on site to check the work at the critical moments to make sure it's done right (eg. before pouring concrete). He needs to have the authority to stop work if it's bad and/or force them to redo it. they also need to approve the plans and the product that will be installed. It is common practice in government contracts that the builder has to submit for approval the spec sheet for most of the products that they want to install.

Basically, you want to follow the same procedure a large city would use but skip some of the red tape that don't apply to you.

The contract is very important, I would recommend copying it from whatever is the most used one in your region for public work. It's probably gonna be a >200 page monster but it will cover every single situation you could possibly imagine and provide a fair way to resolve the situation.

Of course they were. Otherwise they simply couldn't have built it. They could not round people up, chain them together, and force march them to the construction site.

Construction companies (on average) don't look further than the point of sale. It doesn't matter if a poorly chosen element of design in an apartment building will potentially affect thousands of people over the course of decades, the incentive/risk structure just doesn't exist to make forward thinking decisions.

Its basically got to be in the building code or (almost) no one will do it.

I don't, so maybe it's not the best example.

But take houses for example, it's not common to see a dozen or more identical houses being built. After you've done 11, number 12 is not going to be much different.

The problem is not the people completing the work; it's not like Aldi's has their own paving machine in the back.

It's that the government doesn't have employees who know how to specify the project and nobody has an incentive to finish in a timely manner.

This can easily be explained in the part of the world I live in. Small/medium construction companies prefer to work on bigger projects than a house for obvious reasons. So they'll come over and do parts of your house in between jobs on the bigger sites which freqently means massive delays.

Only if they don't want any economic future. You're not thinking long term.

That's just bad engineering. You should know how many pipes and pumps you have of what kind and where, and from that know how many residents it can support. Then you can predict when the infrastructure will become insufficient and start the upgrade in time to finish it before that happens. With enough margin of safety that you're still in the clear even if your estimates are off within the typical range that estimates have been off for similar past projects.

It's no surprise that some places get that wrong from time to time, but the solution is to do better next time. If you're at the point that you have to halt housing construction because your infrastructure can't keep up with it, the point where you screwed up was several years in the past.

You are ignoring the tens of thousands of hours pre-built builders put into streamlining designs that can be put on almost any plot of land. Think of it as downloading a piece of software and saying "oh it just works everywhere" while ignoring the engineering time that went into testing and bug fixing on every platform.

Regardless of what you see as a casual outside observer, an architect and civil engineer are putting their stamps on each set of blueprints for each construction site.

that's a bit circular, no?

Umm, the sites are the sites.

We're going to somehow attempt to leverage our one standard design and rule out the very existance of any local circumstances by adding enough expertise?

Good luck with that.

You might want to pick a better analogy as you've literally described all roofing construction at this point

Building considerations are waaaaaay more involved and complicated than you can even begin to imagine.

Exactly.

waaaaat? That is completely utterly 100% unreasonable. Unless you mean that you expect every adult member of society to do those things?

I am also not a civil engineer but I can think of a lot of ways to add concrete to a skyscraper in ways that are somewhere between nonhelpful and burdensome.

If you can't build the design, then someone will have to design something else that can be built. If people aren't already using cookie cutter designs, there is a reason for that. The reason may be one that most people don't like, but it is still going to be there.

And I am putting that the reason is probably going to be that the law probably does require consideration of site-specific factors.

> Strange how literally everyone in the world can figure this out, but not the US.

As mentioned, most of the world doesn't apply US standards and laws.

And you're speaking a bit strongly. Most of the world doesn't figure infrastructure out. The median for project management and country-wide governance is dysfunctional failure across most of the globe. You can tell because most people are impoverished despite us having all the tools to sort that out for something like a century.

Hard disagree on this wishful thinking. I've literally seen the submitted plans for my house - there was absolutely no architect or engineer stamp on them. The true mega-builders might do this, but smaller operations (say, 25 to a few hundred houses a year) don't.

In my subdivision (which will be a few hundred houses built by one company) the plans are all new to this subdivision, designed by the head guy, and there aren't enough houses of any plan to amortize "tens of thousands of hours" among them (they've built 4 copies of my house so far, for reference).

You don't need an engineer or architect involved in building a "normal" house or developing plans in large parts of the country. There's no calculations required, for the most part, either. The codes allow a prescriptive path to compliance, so if you fall the span charts in the codes, it's good to go.

The only real notable exception is in truss design - but that's never designed by an architect either. The builder sends the house design to a truss company along with required loads in the area, and the truss company sends back trusses that cover the space and hold the required loads.

Threads like this are peak HN - people who "know better" how the world should work (and hey, I wish I worked like that too) telling people who have actually experienced something their experience can't possibly be real. I actually have had a house built recently. I did a ton of research, and this builder was the best I could do in my area and at my price range (about $600k). The options get a LOT worse as you spend less on new constructions.