In The Ten Books on Architecture (also know as De architectura), Vitruvius (1st Century BC) complains about construction cost over-runs:
In the famous and important Greek city of Ephesus there is
said to be an ancient ancestral law, the terms of which are severe, but its
justice is not inequitable. When an architect accepts the charge of a public
work, he has to promise what the cost of it will be. His estimate is handed to
the magistrate, and his property is pledged as security until the work is done.
When it is finished, if the outlay agrees with his statement, he is
complimented by decrees and marks of honour. If no more than a fourth has to be
added to his estimate, it is furnished by the treasury and no penalty is
inflicted. But when more than one fourth has to be spent in addition on the
work, the money required to finish it is taken from his property.
Would to God that this were also a law of the
Roman people, not merely for public, but also for private buildings. For the
ignorant would no longer run riot with impunity, but men who are well qualified
by an exact scientific training would unquestionably adopt the profession of architecture.
Gentlemen would not be misled into limitless and prodigal expenditure, even to
ejectments from their estates, and the architects themselves could be forced,
by fear of the penalty, to be more careful in calculating and stating the limit
of expense, so that gentlemen would procure their buildings for that which they
had expected, or by adding only a little more. It is true that men who can
afford to devote four hundred thousand to a work may hold on, if they have to
add another hundred thousand, from the pleasure which the hope of finishing it
gives them; but if they are loaded with a fifty per cent increase, or with an
even greater expense, they lose hope, sacrifice what they have already spent,
and are compelled to leave off, broken in fortune and in spirit.
From the translation by Professor Morris H Morgan (1855-1910).
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