At a recent project in the Pinch district (just north of the Bass Pro pyramid), we were hired to reinforce and repair a two-span 1940's Quonset Hut for new use as a commercial rental kitchen. Things did not go exactly as planned - in large part due to lack of Construction Phase support services. What we industry folks call CA.
When it comes to our smaller adaptive reuse projects, we often find that CA services are overlooked by the Client despite our bests efforts to the contrary.
Clients need to know that ensuring a building’s structural integrity is not guaranteed by delivering a good design and good construction documents. The real challenge is often about making sure what’s designed gets built correctly. Construction Administration (CA) serves as the critical bridge between engineering design and construction reality.
Unfortunately, CA is often undervalued or even skipped entirely, especially on existing building alteration, repair, or retrofit projects, where its absence can result in significant safety risks, cost overruns, poor performance, and legal liabilities.

Sidebar: A bit of Quonset History
Quonset huts are the original pre-engineered metal buildings developed for WW2, consisting of ultra-light-weight steel ribbed vaults, supporting thin steel deck, and bearing on a concrete stem wall foundation.

The beauty of the Quonset hut lay in its simplicity and efficiency. Not only could it be quickly and cheaply produced, it could be transported as easily as a comparable sized tent, and with greater end-use versatility. More than 153,000 Quonsets, often called “tin cans” by their occupants, were eventually produced over the course of the war.

After the war, as bases worldwide were decommissioned, the huts were torn down or sold off by the thousands for pennies on the dollar as surplus. Many of these wound up in post-war residential and commercial use.
In one unusual post-war use, the fledgling Decca Record Company used a surplus Quonset as a recording studio in Nashville, Tennessee. It seems that the shape and the steel construction made for excellent acoustics. Stars such as Patsy Cline, Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, and the legendary Man in Black, Johnny Cash, recorded in that Quonset hut studio early in their careers.
Although many have disappeared over the past decades, here and there, you can still find the familiar half-round shape serving as out-buildings, barns, homes, garages, diners, or even churches. Some urban examples, like our project in the Pinch, have brick facades, to disguise the utilitarian shape:

Trouble in the Pinch
Quonsets were developed to provide enclosure from the environment, not to handle all the roof loading required for a commercial kitchen. Also, they weren't designed for permanence. To make them permanent, the steel roof needs to be protected from stormwater using a commercial roofing system. Due to the unusual shape, the roofing system boundaries were not always detailed properly, allowing water to enter at the edges and rust the thin metal.
Such is the case with this project - the most severe liability is in the bolts connecting the steel to the concrete stemwalls. Many of these are severely rusted and approaching failure. If these connections fail, the vault will spread and the roof may collapse.

To repair the connections, we designed new connections of the steel ribs to the stemwalls, and added new CFS ribs to reinforce the roof for RTU's etc. We produced a detailed drawing set, Sealed and Permitted.

Knowing that the labor pool for smaller projects is often not very skilled at reading drawings, I was worried that we did not have an explicit CA contract (we did have a line item in our contract that CA would be provided on an hourly basis). This is often not enough, as the Team doesn't follow through to schedule a Pre-Construction meeting to kick off the CA. Sure enough, the Contractor took our drawings, looked them over, and moved forward with the Architectural and MEP drawings instead.

I followed up with the architect regularly, and once I became aware that construction had started, I dropped in on the job site to find construction well underway, with slab cuts for plumbing, interior studwalls framed, furring for the new ceiling finishes installed, etc. The contractor had scanned our drawings but missed some of the structural reinforcement, and what he did install, was not connected per our design.
Much of the new furring would need to be removed to allow the structural reinforcement to be installed. Once the contractor priced all we had designed and documented, the added cost convinced the owner/developer to scrap the project (also the commercial kitchen tenant had backed out of the Lease)
The owner now plans to keep the existing shell and use it as an antique car storage and maintenance facility. Much of the work already performed was wasted, and the repairs are not completed. Will the owner finish the repair of the compromised connections?
That is TBD.
Conclusion
Undervaluing or omitting CA can have severe consequences. A Pre-Construction meeting is essential to getting the GC on the right track. And to make sure they have studied and understand the drawings.
How about you, my Architecture and Engineering Design colleagues? How do you ensure that CA is included in your existing building projects?
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