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Is the IBC Too Restrictive?

jar546

jar546

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In the IBC, there are provisions for allowable building heights and areas based on construction type and occupancy. Some argue these restrictions can unnecessarily hamper architectural creativity and innovation, while others believe they are essential for maintaining urban safety. Do you believe the IBC's current standards are too restrictive, or are they necessary for public safety? How could they be improved without compromising safety?
 
This would be impossible for me to know without knowing how and why these restrictions were determined in the first place. If the reasons are a long story that takes a lot of time of reading and research, I'm not that interested enough to do it.
 
Heights & areas don't seem too restrictive to me, but I've been dealing with them for a half century since Virginia adopted BOCA.

If I remember correctly, the ICC took the largest height & area from the previous model codes so that buildings built under a code with lower limits wouldn't become non-compliant when the IBC was adopted.

I found the old way of using one table and a couple calculations to be much simpler than the current method which requires you to go to 3 different tables. I guess they complicated it because too many people couldn't do simple arithmetic anymore.
 
I guess one way to ask if any code too restrictive is to look at other highly developed nations, compare the requirements of each building code, and compare the building life safety statistics.

For example, are there areas where the ICC codes are more stringent than European codes? If so, is there both correlation AND causation in a proportional reduction in building-related fatalities? (I'm not referring to localized issues such as seismic or wind design, I'm referring to more generalized life-safety issues).
Is that correlation worth it?

I design affordable public housing (among other things). If I end up with accessibility requirements that increase a typical one bedroom unit by just 2 feet in width, that works out to about 8% fewer units that can be fit on a site. So when ANSI increases its turning circle diameter, or California requires more grab bar space, it literally leaves people unhoused.

At the end of the day, prescriptive codes are a political act. They offer a "bright line" method of simplifying compliance to a point where society collectively agrees that a building is "safe enough", without burdening the project with extensive analysis on a performance basis.

How much risk is worth it? Are there diminishing returns on increased safety vs. the additional expense of construction associated with a code? What are the other trade-offs and unintended consequences? We don't like to talk about this because it can sound crass, cold and heartless to develop codes and laws based on some assumed acceptable level of loss and death. I sound much more noble when I can declare "if it saves just one life, this more stringent code will be worth it", rather than "meh, X loss of life is an acceptable tradeoff for other benefits to society". But of course, if you took "if it saves just one life" to its logical conclusion, you would have highway speed limits of 3 mph, no airplanes in the sky, no alcohol in the bar... and never-ending covid lockdowns.
 
I'll put my 2c in on the subject of "E" occupancies. I think that a 2hr barrier should be able to be used to divide building areas rather than 2hr fire walls in some of these massive schools. It's not out of the norm for some schools to be single story and 100K + in size and doing alterations in these beasts require cutting them up with fire walls and terminations on exterior walls that are difficult to locate structurally/separation wise.
 
princeofpen said:
I'll put my 2c in on the subject of "E" occupancies. I think that a 2hr barrier should be able to be used to divide building areas rather than 2hr fire walls in some of these massive schools. It's not out of the norm for some schools to be single story and 100K + in size and doing alterations in these beasts require cutting them up with fire walls and terminations on exterior walls that are difficult to locate structurally/separation wise.
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Rarely have to do a firewall in an alteration....
 
steveray said:
Rarely have to do a firewall in an alteration....
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It's typical in add/reno's where we would be adding 50K sq ft to an already 100K existing or enclosing a current courtyard as that increases the roof area and is seen as an addition.
 
princeofpen said:
It's typical in add/reno's where we would be adding 50K sq ft to an already 100K existing or enclosing a current courtyard as that increases the roof area and is seen as an addition.
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An alteration is not the same as an addition. In an addition, simply place the fire wall at the mate-line between new and old. Not that complicated.
 
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