Today’s first installment deals with the sweeping change brought about by the adoption by the State of California of the International Building Code (IBC) as of January 1^st, 2008. In late November of last year I had my entire staff, including myself, trained to the new code. That day, after spending a mind-numbing 8-hour session taking a 600 mile-an-hour race through a litany of bullet points that barely grazed the surface of the most important changes to the code, two major, important issues jumped right out at me:

• A great deal of this really won’t affect most homeowners and smaller architects who deal mostly with residential construction, though there are a **handful** of important items that will trip up even them…
• There are so many changes that have not clearly been tested in a plan check process that it is going to take years for the DBI (Department of Building Inspection) plan checkers to figure out exactly how to deal with it all. Of course they will never admit to this openly, but it was quite clear to everyone in this seminar that there are way too many “gray areas” that are untested in the local specificities to have hard answers right away.

What this really means is that most architects will not be able to give their clients clear, certain answers to many code related questions for some time to come. The good news is that much of the “standard knowledge” that we architects have internalized as rote memory, like stair rise-and-run ratios, legal dimensional clearances, legal headroom, and such issues, are virtually all unchanged. The major changes relate almost exclusively to fire ratings, rated separations, separations along property lines etc. The changes to the code should not be onerous for most architects to “re-learn”, but I will try to outline some of the major points, as reference for us all, in a subsequent posting.

Email Joel about this posting at joel@group41inc.com

Joel Karr

Diving headlong into the wild world of the blogosphere, we are embarking here upon a journey, the direction of which we don’t yet know, but which will certainly be interesting, entertaining, and ultimately uplifting. There may be items logged here by any of us in the Group 41 team, as we all bring particular expertise to the mix, and can add valuable insights to the experiences of our clients, partners, and friends.

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