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The architect who forgot the stairs

Ed the Editor's personal blog corner

I once heard of an architect who had the contract to design and prepare the plans for new homes on an army base in Germany. They did their job, the military approved the plans and assorted builders priced up the work based on the drawings. The contract was awarded to the best tender. Work started on time, preliminary stages were signed off by the architect, and all was going well, until someone pointed out a minor oversight.

They were two-storey homes. The architect had neglected to include a set of stairs in any of the plans.

The architect was an idiot, the guys signing off the project were incompetent. You may also wonder what sort of builder would miss that sort of detail when submitting the original tender for work. I suggest the builders were very shrewd, and would definitely have played dumb when asked why they never pointed out the lack of access to bedrooms.

The point to remember is that in construction, some of the most profitable companies are the ones who exploit mistakes made by others. The builder knew very well that the architect had screwed up, and they probably laughed their heads off when they were awarded the contract to build hundreds of homes without stairs. However, they did nothing contractually wrong to quote the cost of building homes in accordance with the plans they had been presented with. It wasn't their job to question the design! That was the job of the military responsible for providing livable housing for their people.

As a result of that monumental cock-up, the builders earned a shedload of extra money putting things right. In civvy street, perhaps the architect and the paymasters of the project would have been bankrupted by the extra costs of redesign, remodeling and backtracking. But the money was government backed, safe and everyone would have been paid. Good work if you can get it.