Overview

One way of viewing planning and design is as a process of avoiding failure; design proceeds from weighing solutions in terms of what won t fail. Henry Petroski has observed that design is always evaluated in terms of failure and success is celebrated in terms of failure avoided. Brilliant success avoids failure brilliantly, he writes (Petroski 2000). Failure is most often perceived as the antithesis of success, but in fact, it is sometimes a matter of perception one person s failure is another s success. The operation was a success but the patient died is an expression of this axiom.

Sometimes failure is an event. The elevated walkways in the Kansas City Hyatt Regency were a successful design. When they failed because of an ill-advised contractor s modification, it was an event. The design was sound. A bridge can be said to be a successful design until the day it suddenly falls down. Success in this sense is a condition or a state, but once a design is seen to have failed, it cannot be seen again to be otherwise.

Success and failure in site development may be defined in many ways and have many causes. Economic failure may be a result of poor financial planning, a change in the marketplace, unexpected development or operating costs. The examples that are most often cited in discussions of engineering failures almost always are limited to projects or designs that were on the cutting edge of design and materials. Catastrophic failure in site planning is rare primarily...