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Evolution of the standards system in Australia is tracking the evolution of the United States standards system administered by the American National Standards Institute. In many economic sectors adherence to Australian Standards is mandated by legislation, however, access to the standards are often cost prohibitive, particularly to small business and sole traders.
Principal petitioner Andrew Gardso, an electrical engineer, states,
“This in essence will force small organisations and sole traders out of business or necessitate services being performed without having access to these standards.”
Access to Standards Australia Construction codes can cost more than $2673 for three years’ access to the National Construction Code set of standards. A petition to the Australian parliament’s House of Representatives seeks free or affordable access to essential standards that govern the safety and consistency of products services and systems, including design and construction.
The framework primarily serves educational and research purposes, where it is often important to identify groups of roughly comparable institutions. The classification includes all accredited, degree-granting colleges and universities in the United States that are represented in the National Center for Education Statistics Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.
The world’s first building codes were put in action in ancient Babylon by King Hammurabi around 1754 BCE. The codes were a subset of the larger Code of Hammurabi and were designed to regulate the construction of buildings in the city of Babylon. These codes emerged from a time of great social and economic change in Babylon. The city* was rapidly expanding, and the construction of new buildings was essential for accommodating the growing population.
Famously, building unsafe buildings carried “risk” to the builder:
“If a builder builds a house for someone, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built falls in and kills its owner, then that builder shall be put to death.” (Law 229, Sacred Texts)
Fast forward 3700 years and construction litigation is Big Business. According to research by one of the first names in construction dispute research (Arcadis) the the average cost of construction disputes in North America is $19.6 million with an average length of was 15.2 months (2020 data).
When university-affiliated healthcare facilities are included in the count, the education industry is the largest non-residential building construction market in the United States at about $100 billion every year.
We meet at the usual time today for a status check on public commenting opportunities on best practice titles that set the standard of care for designing, building and operating the physical spaces of education communities. In the past we have limited our coverage to the International Code Council suite. Today we expand our interest to other model building codes; a few of them listed below:
To a surprising degree these bodies borrow safety concepts from one another; owing to field experience, technological changes. response to government regulation regarding disasters and accessibility, among others. Some of the concepts we have been tracking:
Use of education facilities as storm shelters
Occupancy classifications
Carbon monoxide detection and alarms
Electric vehicle power supply from new buildings
Daylight responsive lighting controls
Scope of work in alterations
Enhanced classroom acoustics
Security (door locking, access, etc.)
Assemblies, laboratories, sport facilities, etc, etc, etc.
(Plenty to do)
We will pick through the transcript of the ICC Group B Public Comment Monograph to estimate the state of the debate ahead of this month’s meetings in Lexington:
* The modern-day name of Babylon is Al Hillah, which is a city in central Iraq, about 85 kilometers south of Baghdad. It is located on the east bank of the Euphrates River and was once an important cultural and political center in ancient Mesopotamia.
The retreat of state funding at public institutions paired with the growing concerns surrounding vulture capitalism that has weaponized philanthropic gift-giving (i.e., distinguished chairs, scholarships and fellowships, academic research centers, faculty lines, campus maintenance) means educators must find ways to teach students about the importance of using their knowledge and skillsets to promote public interests and improve lives. The term vulture capitalism is used here as it relates to donor influence to critique the types of donors (individuals, foundations, and corporations) who use gift-giving to advance conservative, elitist agendas that serve privatized interests at the expense of public interests (Carey, 2019; Mintz, 2019). Vulture capitalism and donor (gift-giving), as a case study, provide instructors and students constructive opportunities to reflect on how hegemonic power operates in and impacts our daily lives. To do so, the article begins by reflecting on a few examples of harmful donor influence to demonstrate how discussions concerning vulture capitalism can stimulate important conversations surrounding power, hegemony, and institutional oppression. It is argued that critical communication pedagogy (CCP) assists instructors who wish to teach students how to discuss issues of power and hegemony in contemporary communication classrooms. CCP offers a pragmatic approach to addressing and examining how power operates through a consideration of language and discourse. This article highlights three major tenets of CCP to propose an in-class activity that stresses the importance of dialogic reflexivity in classroom conversations concerning hegemony, power, and communication.
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At the moment all titles in this catalog seem to be stabilized although a great deal of economic activity in the commercial real estate market involves adjustment to the circumstances of the pandemic. Largely because a sizeable portion of square footage in every school district, college, university and university-affiliated healthcare research and clinical delivery system derives at least part of its funding from governments at all levels there are workgroups devoted to measuring square footage and documenting its use. For example:
Getting square-footage right is essential for securing an organization’s sustainability and “green” claims for example. The links in previous posts provide for information about future public consultations.
We maintain the BOMA catalog on the agenda of our Space Planning, Hammurabi and Architectural colloquia, hosted 6 to 8 times annually. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting, open to everyone.
We drill into the specifics commonly found in education communities: sub-lease of space to private industry in publicly-owned facilities. The Building Owners and Managers Association International is an ANSI-accredited consensus standard developer and revised its standard — BOMA Z65.5 Retail Properties: Standard Method of Measurement. Measuring the area of a retail building can quickly become complex when variables must be considered such as ancillary space, mezzanines and storefront lease lines. Many large research universities have long since leased space within many of their building envelopes for private industry to service their communities — student unions, hospitals, dormitories and athletic venues, for example. From the project prospectus:
Z65.5 is intended exclusively for retail properties and their associated structures and may be applied to single-tenant, multi-tenant or multi-building configurations. It features a single method of measurement, with two levels of measurement data, known as Partial Measurement and Overall Measurement for retail properties. It does not measure sidewalks, surface parking, drainage structures, or other ancillary site improvements. This standard is chiefly designed to generate Gross Leasable Area figures, a key metric in retail leasing; however, it also produces area figures which may be of interest to those examining space utilization, valuation, benchmarking, and the allocation of building expenses to various cost centers. The scope of this standard is not intended to be submitted for consideration as an ISO, IEC, or ISO/IEC JTC-1 standard.
Public consultation is open until February 8th.
You may obtain an electronic copy from: floorstandards@boma.org. Send comments (with optional copy to psa@ansi.org) to: floorstandards@boma.org. We encourage user-interest subject matter experts in education facility management to participate directly in the BOMA standards development process by communicating directly with Tanner Johnson at BOMA (tjohnston@boma.org) or 202-326-6357 for more information.
We keep the BOMA catalog on the standing agenda of our colloquia devoted to building construction best practice. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.
– To promote an unambiguous framework for determining the areas of Industrial Buildings with a strong focus on Rentable Area calculations;
– To facilitate transparency and clear communication of building measurement concepts among all participants in the commercial real estate
industry;
– To allow a comparison of values on the basis of a clearly understood and generally agreed upon method of measurement; and
– To align concepts and measurement methodologies with the International Property Measurement Standards: Industrial Buildings (January 2018)
document.
Send comments (with optional copy to psa@ansi.org) to: tjohnston@boma.org
Standards Michigan follows, but d0es not advocate in most of the BOMA standards suite for the following reasons:
Educational facility occupancies are fairly well accounted for in existing federal and state regulations
Advocacy in energy-related best practice titles are a better use of resources at the moment.
We encourage user-interest subject matter experts in education facility management to participate directly in the BOMA standards development process by communicating directly with Tanner Johnson at BOMA (tjohnston@boma.org) or 202-326-6357 for more information.
We maintain the entire BOMA suite on our periodic Model Building Code colloquia. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.
Issue: [15-200]
Category: Architectural, Space Plaaning, Facility Asset Management
Harvard University Art Museum | In the Sierras, Lake Tahoe | Albert Bierstadt
Best is water
— Pindar 476 B.C.
The American Water Works Association (AWWA) has an extensive catalog that sets the standard of care for water quality and piping systems running through all communities.
We approach them from the point of view of education communities; some with agriculture, vast hospital systems heavily dependent upon a higher level of water quality and district energy plants. Like most every technology in the United States, water issues enliven political discourse. Essential features of water supply — such as backflow protection, separation, piping systems to playground water fountains, etc. — are subordinated to fury over to access and tariff issues. For the moment we steer away from them.
The landing page for the AWWA standardization enterprise is linked below:
The original University of Michigan standards advocacy enterprise engaged in some back-and-forth with the backflow and cross-connection technical committees. It found ambiguity in the language found in AWWA C510-C511-C512 covering reduced pressure zone (RPZ) values that caused some education facility units to over-specify RPZ valves for all facility classes. Many research universities have enterprises that create toxic water waste which must be blocked from entering the municipal water supply. Some of that back-and-forth is recounted in the workspace linked below.
We found that minimum requirements for backflow prevention technology was easier managed at state level plumbing safety administrative boards.
Several AWWA standards are now open for public review; AWWA G430 Security Practices for Operation and Management among them. We point you toward them; though, in the interest of resource conservation, we will follow but not advocate user-interest in this product at the moment. It appears to have stabilized compared with other standards in the water safety domain (though that could change).
Comments due August 9th.
We find AWWA best practice literature heavily referenced in school district, college and university design guidelines and construction contracts. We do a status check of the AWWA suite every month during our Water teleconferences. See our CALENDAR for the next online meeting; open to everyone.
#Backflow Incident: A winery in a small town of Italy, backpressures 1,000 liters of wine into the water supply. The cause, a faulty valve.https://t.co/pFMIUSfwfp
New update alert! The 2022 update to the Trademark Assignment Dataset is now available online. Find 1.29 million trademark assignments, involving 2.28 million unique trademark properties issued by the USPTO between March 1952 and January 2023: https://t.co/njrDAbSpwBpic.twitter.com/GkAXrHoQ9T
