The balcony which collapsed killing six Irish students was only meant to be a decorative feature in the building design, it has emerged.
A former planning official in the Californian university city of Berkeley has said the structures approved in the original consent had not been intended for practical use.
The small, fourth-floor balcony was crowded with people attending a 21st birthday party when it collapsed.
Five Irish students were killed, along with a 22-year-old Irish-American woman from California.
Rotten beams appear to be the cause of the tragedy, according to Berkeley's mayor.
Tom Bates said investigators believe the wood was not sealed properly at the time of construction and was damaged by moisture as a result.
Berkeley building inspectors also found another balcony at the apartment building was "structurally unsafe and presented a collapse hazard", and ordered it to be demolished.
Two other balconies in the building were declared off-limits.
Carrie Olson, a former Berkeley Design Review Committee official, said the balconies were for decorative rather than practical purposes, the Irish Independent reported.
Ms Olson said: "(They were) definitely not large enough to be what the city would call an 'open-space balcony', where groups of people could stand outside."
It also highlighted a 57-page California planning regulation dating from 1998 which said the balconies were only required to have a structural capacity to handle 60lbs per square foot.
The Library Gardens apartment complex is about two blocks from the University of California Berkeley campus across the bay from San Francisco.
Construction of the building was completed in 2007, with a final inspection conducted in January of that year.
Families of the dead students have begun arriving in California, as Minister for the Diaspora Jimmy Deenihan has travelled to the US to give first hand support.
Ashley Donohoe, an Irish-American woman from Rohnert Park, California, was 22; Olivia Burke, Eoghan Culligan, Niccolai Schuster, Lorcan Miller and Eimear Walsh were 21.
Three of those killed studied at University College Dublin (UCD).
Around 1,000 people held a vigil in a park in Berkeley this morning to remember the six students killed and pray for the seven who were injured.
