Why is the quality of construction being discussed so much right now? Is today's quality particularly poor? The question has just been asked, but it could just as well have been asked two hundred years ago.
The oldest magazine articles I've seen related to construction quality are from the end of the 1800th century, and similar considerations have certainly been made before that. At the end of the 1800th century, the press has also highlighted current issues such as the shortage of land and the high cost of housing.
Questions related to the quality of construction have therefore been on the agenda of the public debate considerably before today. The subject pops up at regular intervals like a fish's head on the surface of the water. After the wars, during the decades of reconstruction, the number of apartments was a much more interesting subject than their quality. At the end of the 70's, the discussion about quality started to rekindle little by little.
When discussing the topic, construction errors often come to the fore. Today, the causes of errors are very often sought in the strict construction schedules. If we take the 70s as a yardstick, the assumption should probably be that the houses of more than forty years ago were built with high quality, because even then, significantly more time was spent on building houses than today. But is this so?
Hardly anyone considers the 70s as the golden age of quality construction. More recently, in connection with the renovations of the houses of that era, it has been established that quality was a very variable concept at that time. Because the elements have often been built on site, their dimensions vary, there are large differences in the amount of insulation, and in individual cases everything possible has been found between the structures, from rubber boots to newspapers. And despite that, the vast majority of houses were built in accordance with the building regulations of the time and, above all, customs.
Currently, houses that have reached the age of about one hundred years are praised and considered excellent in quality. However, it is worth noting that the concept of quality is also associated with a lot of mental images. Built in the 20th century, the front-end craftsman apartment with its large windows, wide window sills and plank floors is the fulfillment of many dreams. It doesn't matter, even if the windows don't insulate the sound and the corners drag a bit. Even the creaking of the floor under the steps is just a piquant detail. In a suburban apartment building built in 2000, the same characteristics would be unequivocally gross construction errors, for which the person responsible must be punished.
The causes of quality, or quality defects, are most often traced to the construction site. However, mistakes made during the construction phase are often only cosmetic. The handyman's hammer has left a scratch on the door of the new cabinet, a drop of paint has fallen from the brush onto the parquet, or the miter of the floorboard is grimacing. These are also unfortunate and completely unnecessary mistakes, but very easily corrected. However, on some individual sites, completely unimaginable mistakes have been made, which are either due to complete incompetence or indifference.
Bigger mistakes that even affect the health of the residents are usually made already at the design table. The error can be related, for example, to the selection of materials that are not suitable for the conditions or to the wrong type of detailed design. Most of the time, in any case, to such factors that the individual construction worker can no longer take into account on the construction site. A concrete example of this is, for example, the Tikkurila station, where the connection of glass and metal is constantly failing. The construction worker has implemented exactly what was planned, but the designer should have realized the challenges related to the coordination of materials.
The puzzling thing about detecting quality defects is, above all, that attention is most easily drawn to defects related to finishing work. The worst mistakes, such as problems with the waterproofing of underground parts of the building, sometimes become apparent only years after the building is completed. In this case, it could have already caused significant structural damage. Although there are not many construction errors of this scale, especially nowadays, even individual cases are critical and, in addition to high costs, they can cause serious health problems.
There are no statistics on the most common quality defects, but the most serious are precisely the mistakes made in waterproofing. A mistake in the design phase can rarely be corrected as the work progresses, but of course the moisture management of the construction site also plays a significant role in preventing moisture problems. And even after the building is completed, you can't throw the gloves on the counter. The resident himself also plays a role in ensuring, for example, that household appliances that use water are properly installed and that wet rooms are not literally kept wet day after day and week after week.
Unfortunately, mistakes made in the maintenance of the building often go to the top of construction errors. Just like cars, buildings also have a lot of wearing parts and they need regular maintenance. Few car owners neglect periodic maintenance, but the house is still expected to last from decade to decade without doing anything to it, even though its value is significantly higher than the price of the car.
On the other hand, Hyvättää's maintenance activities do not rule out normal wear and tear and changes in structures brought about by technical service life. For example, concrete loses its alkalinity due to the effect of carbon dioxide in the air, regardless of how the concrete building has otherwise been maintained over the years. In addition, it should be remembered that, for example, in the 60s and 70s, the concrete industry was not yet technically top-class, so the concrete structures of that era are considerably shorter-lived than those produced today.
The creation of a long-lasting and high-quality building starts already at the customer stage. An expensive price is not necessarily a guarantee of quality, but the cheapest will certainly produce the worst result. Clients play a key role as factors of quality: they influence how high-quality designers and builders are selected. The overall quality of the building is a chain that extends from the customer to the end user, which is only as strong as its weakest link, regardless of where it is placed in the chain.
Juha-Matti Junnonen
Project manager
Tampere University of Technology
Juha-Matti Junnonen has held teaching and research positions at Aalto University and Tampere University of Technology for over 20 years. His field of teaching and research is construction and construction production and economics.
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