Hi @sillscai ,
This is another great question!
I’ve had this exact situation come up a lot in practice, although in relation to civil engineering and landscape being directly contracted to the owner rather than a structural engineer. It is the contractor’s responsibility to issue the RFI directly to the responsible party, in this case, the structural engineer.
The architect may make themselves liable for getting a timely and accurate response from the structural engineer if they take the responsibility of ensuring the RFI’s are delivered to them…
In practice, what I’ve done when I receive an RFI intended for civil is to respond back to the contractor asking them to issue it to the civil engineer as it is not a part of our scope. Then I copy the civil engineer on the email so they know they should be expecting an RFI and can follow up as needed.
In all reality, it’s probably not a huge issue if you forward the RFI on to civil engineer one time with the contractor copied in just to say, ‘hey, I think Contractor should have issued this to you instead of me’. But, unless you put your foot down, the contractor will start to rely on you to get the RFI’s to parties who aren’t your consultants very quickly if you start to do so. I would definitely avoid doing so in practice and for the purposes of the ARE it is definitely something that shouldn’t be done.
The distinction between the architect’s responsibility as a basic service to coordinate with information provided by the owner’s consultants vs. the supplemental service of coordinating the owner’s consultants is very tricky. We had another very similar question to this awhile back. Check out that thread at the link below:
Hope this helps!
-Darion