- Determining if Renovations to an Existing Occupied Structure Adhere to IBC

Hello everyone. My name is Ron Brinkman, I'm an architectural designer with Leo A Daly. Today I'm going to be talking about an elementary school remodel here in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Detailing and working with building codes and building code requirements is a very, very critical and important piece of what we do every day in our projects. For this particular project, this is an existing structure, an existing occupied structure, which means that whatever intervention that we can do has to either modify or change all of the jurisdiction's understanding of that, or it has to not impede on it.

Additionally, because this existing structure is a lot of different additions, and a lot of different code reviews, we thought it necessary and important to include our modern interpretation, since we were actually changing the function of some of the spaces and changing the exit ways of some of the spaces. We included our interpretation of the code plan as it exists for the building.

This is something that in Minnesota especially, we're required to do almost on every project. Other jurisdictions have other rules but it's a very common practice in our industry to do something of this manner. Speaking to the authority having jurisdiction, whether it's the city, county, government, municipality, whoever's building it resides in. This is a very common way to show our kind of architectural intent and how we're going to provide really good health, safety, and welfare for the building, and the occupants of that building.

So in this particular example, we abided by 2015 Minnesota building code, which is longhand for saying 2015 International Building Code with some modifications. It's also very, very common in a lot of municipalities, they'll make tweaks or variations within their region of the world, to kind of cater the International Building Code to them. Minnesota being no exception to that.

But we did abide by IBC 2015 as well, and we reference IBC 2015 a lot as well. The most important ones that are very, very common, we tend to outline, are chapter three, five, and six. Probably the most common three. And those generally refer to chapter three within IBC, is going to refer to what occupancy the building is. This is existing education, that one's fairly easy.

If you're working with lots of projects, they can be a lot more complicated than that, but this one's all education. So that one's actually quite easy. Again, it's an existing building, so our general heights and areas are always the same, we're just telling the code official, hey, we're not changing anything. We're going to keep it as it is, and if you guys have a problem with that, please let us know. And then for this building, the last one, that's kind of important, is the type of construction.

The type of construction over this building has changed over the years, because the codes themselves have changed over the years. So this is just saying, our interpretation of it is that even though the types of construction of this building have sort of changed with how the code reads, it is still valid within the modern code of the types of construction it exists as. Uniquely, for this project, we changed a few things related to accessibility, so we added a few notes about that. We changed a few things about egress in and out of the building, so we added some additional notes to that.

Those are a little bit easier to see on our plan here. We added this new entryway here, and changed it so that some of the building in the office wing can exit through that entryway. And this little formula right here says, yes, their door is in fact big enough for that many people to exit through that entryway. So this is the type of information that we would use to detail and work through code and jurisdictional inquiries for projects.

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