Operational Direction of Regional Building Safety(RBS) Center for Preliminary Review of Architectural Administration in Korea

In Korea, local government officials are in charge of buildings, and as such are supposed to review submitted documents related to the architectural administration to ensure that they comply with the legal standards. However, these officials generally put a greater emphasis on the preparation of the set of documents required for the administrative work than the content the documents contain. For this reason, many experts point out that the shortage of officials specialized in buildings and construction, as well as the lack of expertise among the building officials in the local governments, may result in repeated safety accidents during building construction. The purpose of this study is to propose the operational direction of a Regional Building Safety (RBS) center to secure the performance and safety of buildings by utilizing private resources. In this study, we carried out a pilot project to verify the effects of an RBS center and to derive the specific number of experts required. As a result, the technical matters were resolved in approximately 15% of the total cases of the document processing procedure, and the level of technical specialization among the officers has also been improved through the provision of guidance. The research findings support the validity and effects of the introduction of the RBS center. Finally, this study proposes (1) the types of RBS Centers that should be established, (2) the roles and business scope of the RBS Center, (3) the specific number of experts required, (4) the qualifications of the experts, and (5) the business regulations of the RBS Center.