New Construction Code to be available in Romania

[trilitica]

New Construction Code to be available in Romania

The State Construction Inspectorate (ISC) elaborated the new Construction Code in Romania and published a rough form to public debates.
The Order of Romanian Architects Acuses The New Construction Code Of Deminished Role For Architects

The Romanian Construction Code will abrogate all existing laws. This is maybe the most important reason that The Order of Architects of Romania made public protests to the State Inspectorate regarding this mater. One of the appealed laws is the Architect’s Law.

Other powerful observation is that historical buildings and historical sites will be less protected by the new legislation. This issue is another Romanian Public debate. Many critics claim that new buildings especially into the Center of Bucharest are suspected to shade historical buildings. Supporters of new buildings, more pragmatic, start their analyses from the poor condition of old buildings, and, even more, from the chaotic urbanism lead by the former communist governments in the last decades of the 20th century.

On the other part of the barricade, the State Inspectorate claims that the Architects’ Order is just worried to loose their leaders privileges reporting to the rest of the architects and even more to the rest of people working into the architectural and engineering design of buildings: structural engineers and building installation engineers not yet organized into professional groups as the architects are.


New Romanian Construction Code to Increase Building Safety

The Construction Code follows the Romanian authorities policies to increase the safety of the built environment. All those good intentions have good results at the moment, especially in the cities areas where only very few construction are made without a Construction Permit.

The building Safety will be increased due to the next main new articles:
· The obligation for all investors to build the structures of the buildings only by contract with construction firms
· The obligation for constructors and designers to be insured, even that a level of this insurance is not set by the actual form of the new Construction Code. At the moment, the constructors are civil responsible for their work only formally, because they don’t have to provide valid insurance policies to their clients.
Even that both laws, the old one and the new one set civil responsibilities for building designers and constructors for up to ten years, the insurance brokers don’t offer policies that cover more than 3 years cumulated. The lack of specifications of the new Construction Code is not observed by many of the critics.


New Romanian Construction Code to Maintain Authorization Bureaucracy

The Code has not any intention to diminish the Authorization of Buildings bureaucracy.**
Considered both by the Inspectorate (as the author of the Code) and by the Architects’ Order (as the main critics of the new code) as a functional system, the bureaucracy assimilated with the Building Permits and the preliminary avization required are maintained by the new Code.

In the present day, the direct Building Authorization (Building Permit) takes not less than 3 months due to 3 consecutive steps that should be followed by the investor.

More often for the bigger investments that require tall buildings, new lands to be occupied or the change of urbanism coefficients require at least another 3 months.

All those long time that is need since the decision to start a new building till the Building Permit is obtained from the city hall includes more than half periods when main indicators of the new investment can be only predicted and no insurance that a specific height of the building or a land utilization coefficient can be use as a fact to predict the efficaciousness of the investment.

New Construction Code to change almost nothing

The new Construction Code has only a low impact on the construction industry in Romania. The new benefic influences will just bring a small role to the Construction Discipline that follows anyway a positive trend are not supposed to be shaded by a few negative aspects resulted as omissions from the present day available legislation.

As a result, the Construction Code will influence only minor the high economical efficaciousness of real estate and construction industry in Romania. Good business are expected for at least the next decade. The economical growth, one of the most apealing into European Union will suport the (re)construction of Romania.


Octavian Ungureanu
Architect
www.trilitica.com
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* The Construction Code will abrogate also the Law of Architects even that important parts of it are copied. ISC sent a public letter to OAR accusing OAR to be misrepresentative and also having a policy that is not accepted by many Romanian architects. They also quoted an article wrote by myself where I protested against the minimal architectural fees that OAR tried to impose to architectural design practice. I considered this mater a brutal intrusion to the free market and a policy of a group of architects that ran OAR at that time against our youngest colleagues. OAR actually abolished the minimal fees policies as they used to be considered by many people and institutions as not legal.
** I sent a list of observation regarding a new vision of the Construction Code using as a pretext the Letter that ISC sent to OAR. Basically I support for a lower importance of the bureaucracy into the construction industry and construction design. To preserve and increase the safety of the new buildings, another proposal was to increase the responsibility of the architects and engineers that will lead to an effective growth of the quality control starting from the first design steps till the completion of the building, mixed with a very strict construction discipline and a very strict punishments of investors, architects and constructors that tends not to respect the urbanism rules and safety requirements of the buildings.