A construction system is an organizational and technological system that produces buildings or civil engineering structures for human use by fabricating and installing materials into an integrated structure according to design specifications. Failures of such construction systems materialize in various forms, including defective design, rework, and dysfunctional building systems. Frequent accidents and building defects in the construction sector clearly indicate that our society still needs to improve the safety of construction systems. Research studies on how major accidents and minor defects occur are often conducted in isolation by different researchers, and existing system safety concepts and frameworks are not necessarily suited to handling the dynamic nature of temporary multiple organizations (TMOs)—a feature that characterizes the uniqueness of construction projects. We need a framework that can better describe failures specific to construction, and capture the wide spectrum of these failures. Here, we build on concepts from system safety research to develop a graphical notation with “frames” and system hierarchy as the main components to illustrate how pathogens are generated and propagated by defective processes and end up embedded in the physical structure.

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With an aim to gain a better understanding of human habitats and contribute to the enhancement and sustainability of built environments, this paper focuses on the reciprocal of our living environment and first attempts to define the ‘extremeness’ of environments; an ‘extreme environment’ is defined as an environment unsuitable for human habitation. Factors that determine extremeness are examined, and a matrix to categorize and qualitatively evaluate the extremeness of environments is constructed. The discussion then proceeds to the composition of a framework for case studies on construction projects in extreme environments. Three sets of parameters are given as the constituents of the framework: the project’s scope, environmental conditions, and elemental technologies. By applying the framework to case projects, interdependencies between the parameters are identified.