Traditional building codes –
The traditional building codes vary depending on the state as well as the municipality. The co traditional building codes are four in number and they include
- Standard Building Code
- Uniform Building Code (UBC)
- International Building Code (IDC)
- National Building Code (Becker et al, 2007)
Case study
This case study focuses on the social housing project in the County of Los Angeles, California.
Code used,
The code which is applied in this scenario is the international building code. The international building code is a traditional building code which was formed by the international code council and usually, it is more conceded on the safety and the health issues thereby cutting unnecessary costs emanating from the building and the construction materials (Hensen, 2004).
How it is applied
The project was designed on the grounds of a typical masonry cavity which comprised of combining block work together with bricks with the tendering being an open one based on the bill of quantities and the drawings. After this, a separate but alternate construction techniques was awarded and was commissioned by the council after ensuring that it was in compliance with the terms of the international codes. The construction then went down by overseeing that the complex details were reviewed by both the manufacturer and the local authorities. Seminars were put in place to ensure that the timber range was of high quality (Papamichel & Beltran, 2009).
The local authorities did an inspection of the timber framework that was being conducted and found out that some of their expectations were not met going by the set standards. Despite this, the manufacturer defended himself that the local authorities were lacking some information concerning the quality of the said timber. Later, they held a meeting and then all the issues were clarified thereby allowing for the commencement of the project that was tentatively completed in a successful manner.
Any particularly stringent requirements,
One of the main factors that barricades the enforcement and the adoption of the international building codes is the feeling that the national government should play a duty in regulating the developments that are spearheaded by private bodies or sectors. This, therefore, brings a major challenger when these individuals having the feeling that they should be in control of the various developments while the government is also feeling that should tell them the manner in which to conduct their business. This generally creates a sharp divisional and constraint in attempting to apply the international building codes.
Besides, another constraint that comes along the implementation of the international building codes is the failure by the local authorities to fully understand the products that they are applying while doing the construction. For instance, in the case of the project in the County of Los Angeles, the local authorities had no information on the quality of the timer that was used thereby sparking a discussion that eventually made them informed on the product (Sun et al, 2011).
References
Becker, R., Goldberger, I., & Paciuk, M. (2007). Improving energy performance of school buildings while ensuring indoor air quality ventilation. Building and Environment, 42(9), 3261-3276.
Hensen, J. (2004, July). Towards the more effective use of building performance simulation in design. In Proc. 7th International Conference on Design & Decision Support Systems in Architecture and Urban Planning (pp. 2-5).
Papamichael, K., & Beltran, L. (2009, August). Simulating the daylight performance of fenestration systems and spaces of arbitrary complexity: The IDC Method. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference of the International Building Performance Simulation Association, Building Simulation (Vol. 93, pp. 16-18).
Sun, Y. L., Harmer, T., Stewart, A., & Wright, P. (2011, August). Mapping application requirements to cloud resources. In European Conference on Parallel Processing (pp. 104-112). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
