ABSTRACT
For most advanced economies, buildings and other construction represent one of the largest, if not the largest, single investment of national resources. The well-being of such economies is heavily dependent upon the satisfactory performance of its construction since this involves not only the provision of protective envelopes for a myriad of economic activities, it also is critical for the infrastructure and the variety of communication systems providing the lifeblood for such activities. Failures in the built environment occur for a variety of reasons and on a variety of scales. In macroeconomic terms, the small domestic structure which burns to the ground because of a fire started in play by children is insignificant when compared with a national disaster, such as a major earthquake, affecting a million people simultaneously. There are also less obvious types of failure which can cause widespread human distress and be of considerable economic significance, such as problems occurring in populations of system-built construction where many thousands of units have to be considered as unsatisfactory as a result of a few actual failures. Examples of this phenomenon of population failure have occurred in the UK in large-panel system-built housing (BRE, 1985, 1986, 1987) and in long-span school and leisure halls (Bate, 1974, 1984; DoE, 1974) amongst others.
