A scheme for the evaluation of experience of the performance of timber structures

For the future development of a safe and efficient building infrastructure, it is of utmost importance to learn from past experience. In this paper, a scheme for the evaluation of experience gained from failures and malfunctions in timber structures is developed. It is highlighted that the main motivation to analyse structural failures is to learn from them. It is therefore stated that the description of the circumstances that led to structural failures is of highest importance. This is a somewhat different perspective compared to the structuring of information that can be found in existing studies on failed and malfunctioning structures in the literature. There, the focus is on the thorough description of the physical parameters related to the failures. The result of this paper is a proposed template for failure assessment that, in its complete extension, can be downloaded from the World Wide Web. The failure template is “ready to use”; however, it should mainly facilitate further discussions on the formulation on a broadly agreed format for how the structural engineering profession might standardise failure reporting.