37º IAHS World Congress on Housing: - Universidad de Cantabria

XXXVII <strong>IAHS</strong><strong>World</strong> <strong>Congress</strong> on HousingOctober 26 – 29, 2010, Santander, SpainCODE: 1040A CONTRIBUTION TO TECHNICAL INSPECTIONPROCESSES IN RESIDENTIAL BUILDING DIAGNOSISCésar Díaz, Còssima Cornadó, Leiris SimancasDepartment of Building Construction I Technical University of Catalonia (UPC)AbstractDuring the process of building assessment and diagnosis, the interpretation of spots and theway in which building damage appears constitutes an action that is sometimes enough todetermine the causes that provoked the damage. However, sometimes it is not possible tomake this interpretation due to problems of access to specific parts of the building, becausesome damage is hidden or because it is not visible before its effects are seen.The systematic inspection tasks controlled by the public administration to check the adequacyof safety and maintenance measures in buildings (called ITE in Spain) require a vast anddetailed knowledge of both the relationship between visible symptoms and their causes and ofthe way to tackle the different problems of in-situ checking processes where there arepossibly very limited tools available for the carrying out of such inspections, given the limitedfinancial resources allotted to such tasks.From the experience in buildings diagnosis gathered by the DITEC research group from theUPC, a study has been made collecting and presenting a summary of the issues considered tobe transferable to the inspection process protocols, which are specifically applicable to themost usual residential building typologies. The aim of this is to increase the efficiency ofbuilding inspections and to homogenize the criteria assessment from the information obtained.37º <strong>IAHS</strong> <strong>World</strong> <strong>Congress</strong> On Housing Science 360