architecture :: essays research papers

1. Introduction. Northlands rapidly increasing growth in population over the last few years has put huge pressure on the building industry. Many of the building companies and businesses simply cannot find enough staff in order to meet the demand from the ever increasing client base the region is seeing. Due to this, the demand for civil engineers in Northland is very high thus there are a large number of small privately owned companies set up in the area. Richardson Stevens Consultants Ltd. is a privately owned company which is run by three directors. They specialise in structural engineering and their main cliental are a number of home building franchises. They employ structural engineers who have studied civil engineering at university and also draftsmen. Working as an engineer for such a company gives the employee a whole understanding of how the company is run and managed, how problems are dealt with and the rewards of finishing major assignments on time and to a professional standard. 2. Company Structure / Products and Services Richardson Stevens Consultants Ltd. (RSC) was founded in 1997, originally they had one director and employed three structural engineers and a draftsman. It now employs nine engineers, three draftsmen, two secretaries and is run by three directors. The company is based in Whangarei and their work comes from throughout the Northland region. 2.1 Products and Services The majority of the work that RSC perform is structural engineering, however they also do a small amount of geotechnical engineering. As there is no specialist geotech engineer in the office, they have to hand on a lot of their work to offices such as Tonkin Taylor who do have geotechnical engineers. The company does a lot of domestic work for home building franchises such as GJ Gardener homes and Golden homes. Typically this would involve a site investigation first to determine the ground conditions and then make calculations based on these conditions as to what foundations are required. The housing companies all have plans pre-drawn and they sell these to the client. However the clients always want to change something around a bit, so before the housing company can go ahead and build, they come to RSC who do structural calculations in order to determine if the change is ok. RSC also do a lot of work with subdivisions. These involve the civil engineers in the office rather than the structural engineers. Before building consent can be granted to a sub-divider, RSC has to design the roading, sewer, storm-water and the surface drainage.