Judgment of the Provincial Court of Barcelona: the designer’s inescapable duty to know the ground.

Section 17 of the Provincial Court of Barcelona (Audiencia Provincial) has recently overturned a judgment of Court of First Instance No. 4 of Arenys de Mar, ordering the designing architect to pay for failing to carry out a geotechnical survey of the ground or to properly study the ground on which the house was to be built.

Regardless of whether or not the Technical Building Code applied to the works, it was established in the proceedings that no geotechnical survey was carried out and no information about the ground was obtained, and it was the designing architect’s duty to know the ground on which he was going to design the house.

In preparing the design for the detached house, the defendant architect did not carry out any tests on the clients’ plot, nor did he have any information about the ground he built on to know its bearing capacity, strength or foundation level, basic data that any architect needs, now and in the past, in order to prepare a design. The design contained only a brief mention that “a trial pit” had been dug, stating that “sandstone” or “sandy ground” had been found. It did not say at what depth, where, what strength or compaction that ground had, or anything else. His defence was that, in his view, the Technical Building Code did not yet apply and therefore a geotechnical survey of the ground was not compulsory. He also played down the damage, saying it was “normal” settlement of the building and that it had stopped.

However, DPcon’s expert established, by checking 3 tell-tales fixed across several cracks in different areas of the house, which recorded movement of 0.3 mm to 0.5 mm over a period of nearly 6 months, that the settlement had not stabilised and was continuing to move.

The appearance of widespread cracking, and the fact that the cracks were still moving, was a clear sign that the foundations were inadequate. This amounted to a clear design defect, by failing to properly check the configuration of the ground on which the building was to stand. These circumstances undoubtedly determine the choice of foundation type, since building on clay ground is not the same as building on rock, nor is building on loose, heterogeneous soil the same as on firm, homogeneous soil. It was the architect’s duty to study the ground properly, in accordance with his lex artis.

In our view, the first-instance judgment of the Arenys de Mar court was entirely mistaken, since it dismissed the claim on the grounds that, as the Technical Building Code did not apply, the designer was not obliged to investigate the ground or carry out a geotechnical survey, and it did not consider that there was dangerous differential settlement. However, the Provincial Court of Barcelona has overturned and set aside that ruling, upholding our claim in full and ordering the designing architect to pay €73,583.23 plus statutory interest from the date the claim was filed.

DPcon Reclamación Defectos Construcción.