The worst I ran across was an architect doing overlays indexing the plan centerline on the topo R/W which had his plan showing 30 feet more between the street and an existing structure with a pool than really existed. The house was demoed, but the pool stayed. This was in an elite area of mansions on a 10 acre parcel.
When I went to stake out the near corner of the new house to the pool, it fell in the shallow end of the pool.
I was saved by a copy of the original topo done by a very good local survey company. My mapped pool matched their pool with acceptable graphic error.
But how I caught the error as the contractor tried to get the architect to figure out what he had done was hilarious. The contractor saw the hand plotted, measured points of the pool corners on the topo and knew I had it right so set up a meeting with the arch.
What really made it touchy was the owner was a very good structural engineer, but he let his wife pick the architect! OMG!
What was very bad is the contractor insisted on having me adjust the new structure to fit the pool because the architect got him the job! This was in addition to the owner asking for a 5 degree rotation to change views. I told the contractor that the owner needed to be notified because grade issues on driveway approaches effected by the lack of horizontal were going to make it easy to see for the experienced engineer as soon as established finish floor elevations made entry walkways to drive elevations obvious. I really should have just called the engineer owner and told him, bypassing the contractor, but it turned out okay EVEN after 9 foot concrete walls were built on the relocated footprint lines. Not good, but OKAY.
The top of wall elevation/location was all the engineer needed to see to know something was wrong. The fit hit the shan.
1: Residential development. 25 or so condo buildings to be placed on a private loop road. Problem was that 25 buildings didn't fit. So the architect, in his infinite wisdom, scaled the buildings down by about 1/3 and dropped them back in place. This is after the footprint had been chosen and was in design. Worst part is, he was the head of designing said condos.
2: Same project. Also had a public road with a series of very tight village style lots. 5' side yard setbacks. He was told the envelop size for which he could design single family homes. He missed the maximum house width by about 3 feet. We explained again that he could only design houses that were no more than XX' wide. Back to the drawing board. He shaved off 2 feet which left him still too wide for a foot. One more try and he got it.
He still gets work. I don't know how!
I had no idea it got so bad they would scale down footprints to try and get realtor investors profit targets to work.
But I take it nothing like that got permitted in the instance you cite? It was all in the early conceptual planning phase.
I did a boundary & topo of a vacant commercial lot for an architect. This was in the pursuit of building a small office building on the site. He called me back and asked for a benchmark as the city was requiring one on the site to approve the permit. I referred him to the original topo and a san. MH near the corner of the property, with an elevation of something like 1209.15'.
I was later asked to stake the pad & building for the contractor. While the BM info was prominently affixed to the construction prints his F.F. was 100.00' and stated so on a number of the prints and typicals. I searched the prints and there was no tie between the proposed FF and the existing ground.
Long story short, I marked offset stakes at the corners of the building in the order of "Cut 1105.1' to FF". It wasn't long before I was asked to meet the contractor and the architect on site.
After a while he realized that neither I nor the contractor wanted the responsibility of deciding how high above the frontage curb the floor of the new building would be. He almost seemed irritated that we couldn't somehow "make it work".
A month later we went round and round again with the elevations on the proposed parking......o.O
>Cut 1105.1' to FF
:good: Never let it be said that Uncle Paden lacks a sense of humor (Regular readers already knew of his sense of humor).
you mean besides the typical game of graphical pick-up-sticks that you get when you open an architect's CAD file?
ME: snap to ENDP
CAD: which one of the seven?
Yes, the firm I was with at the time was hired to take his concept plan (unrealistic picture with little real world value) and develop it into a nuts and bolts site plan.
The other fun one is when they take your entire survey and scale it up by 12 to work in inches...
Art Gallery of Ontario
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If I said more Angel would censor me !
Derek
I once did a topo and boundary on a 1/4-1/4 in Wyoming and sent it off to a fancy California Architect for design. When I got it back the helpful little bugger had made all of my boundary lines cardinal and even feet for me. Pretty sure he won't do that again.
Here it is 1000 to go from m to mm.
I have three examples for this thread.
- we got involved in a eight townhouse development and it rapidly became apparent that the architect had used a nice square lot to fit the townhouses to rather than the slightly skewed lot that it actually was. Eventually it was a case of "surveyor has to make it fit". Personally I think the architect could not be bothered to amend their plans as they were all hand drawn rather than cad.
- Another surveyor here told me of the time he did a detail survey for a building extension and then went back to set out grid lines for the builders. He got a call asking why he was wrong but it turned out the architect had stretched the old building in cad a little bit to make something fit! There was no way the designed extension was going to fit in the existing building.
- Another was where we had provided some levels and contours of a lot to an architect and months later there seemed to be a problem with the levels. After getting a cad plan from the architect, rotating and scaling it back to fit the real world, we noticed that the contours at the top and bottom of this sloping lot matched perfectly but the ones in the middle had been moved up hill by a few metres. Instead of being a relatively even slope like it should have been (and was in the real world), the architect had a steeper slope at the rear and a flatter slope at the front. No wonder there was an issue!
The thing that really gets me however is how the majority of architects and engineers (at least around here anyway) get defensive and basically refuse to correct their plans when errors are pointed out. I will fully admit to making mistakes but when I do, I will amend plans and data to ensure a correct set of plans are in use. Most times I point out errors I end up having to use plans with amendments hand written on them (with an email trail recording what has happened for insurance purposes) or being told to make it fit on site. All I ask is that professionals have a bit of pride in their own work to fix mistakes in a proper fashion. Apparently that is too much to ask on most occasions.
1) $300,000 exterior perimeter to prevent water infiltration into the basement of a two story building. Upon completion, it had water in the basement. I found the problem to a roof leak that drained through the wall cavity to the basement.
2) Remodel/conversion of an existing historical house type building into a small hotel and restaurant. They never checked the existing height as indicated on the original plans. Turns out it was shout by 2 feet short. After a complete underpinning and a additional $350,000, it all worked just fine.
Money can fix anything.
Now that made me laugh, laugh good!
You are merciless if you actually marked the stakes like that, but you know, it serves them right after requiring a BM then the arch can't use it. OMG;~)
Yup, that's the kind of stuff I used to get all the time.
Working in the graphic mode by hand, making perfect squares, then maxing out foot prints etc.
But that's the first time I've heard of one stretching an existing building then doing structural design on the altered footprint. That one definitely gets rated with the corner of the building falling in the pool, or better:-)
Your description of this;
"After getting a cad plan from the architect, rotating and scaling it back to fit the real world, we noticed that the contours at the top and bottom of this sloping lot matched perfectly but the ones in the middle had been moved up hill by a few metros."
reminded me of the 2 story on a sloping, bad geology lot, prone to slides with a 50 foot fill. That went okay, but when it came time to stake the 40 + caissons I couldn't get the foundation plan to close. The contractor put me in touch with the architect.
On the phone, he opened up his cad file and we worked alongside over the footing runs and caisson locations he in cad, me in my cogo from his prints. There was an offset to the second floor and he had his layering confused and couldn't decide where a +- 2.0' difference could be. Finally he said, "Oh, just make it 2.0' bigger.
When the contractor got into it he discovered that the ground floor was supposed to be overhung by the second floor in the plan by 2.0', well that changed!
It seems your guy got confused as to what layer he was on in cad and inadvertently drug a few polylines a few meters without noticing. An honest operator boo boo. Not like that stretching the building, then designing on it WOW!
I work in a cogo program and export points to cad software with my topo points because I've caught that happening. I always make a layer and lock it, then make another to put the DTM over so I can see a shift if it happens. Sometimes, with real busy topography, I'll make a second layer of contours and lock it, make it invisible, then turn it on occasionally to make sure nothing got shifted.
