Historical constructions are an important value of the world’s cultural heritage. Nearly each day, newspapers inform about fire damages in protected buildings. One reason is that historical constructions often are very fire sensible due to ancient building methods and easily flammable building materials. Therefore, fire safety regulations contribute in an essential way to the countries’ heritage protection. Furthermore, they avoid personal injury, property loss and environmental damage. Heritage protection law tries to preserve historic buildings but, in Germany, it often collides with various safety requirements, such as on load-bearing capacity and fire safety. The paper analyzes recent German heritage protection regulations for preservation and reconstruction of historical buildings and shows the difficulties to balance the interests of heritage protection on the one side and safety aspects on the other side. The authors explain various concepts of fire safety in historical constructions as well as current German legal and technical fire protection regulations for historical buildings. On the example of fire safety demands, the authors show the difficult relationship between heritage protection and safety requirements. They conclude that safety regulations and historical structure protection should not be antagonists but rather collaborate in the interest of preservation of cultural heritage.
During the process of creating civil or structural engineering curriculums, the people in charge sometimes do not recognize the importance of including interdisciplinary subjects that are not directly related to civil or structural engineering fields, such as construction law. There are a variety of reasons for this. The first part of the paper provides an overview about curriculum’s creation processes at German universities. It describes the involved parties and the difficulties in finding a fair balance between the interests of all involved lecturers while observing the legal guidelines. The second part covers whether or not and to what extent construction law courses should be included in a civil or structural engineering program. It discusses the advantages and disadvantages of including construction law courses. The conclusion is that courses in construction law are necessary to ensure graduates’ employability and the qualification to work professionally. However, civil or structural engineering graduates do not have to become Construction Law experts—they only have to acknowledge the seriousness of a situation and to identify a legal problem. This enables the building industry to save money that otherwise might have been spent on unnecessary legal consulting.
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