ICC Evaluation Service Brings Innovation to the Building Code

When Weyerhaeuser, a large forest products company, developed the iLevel Shear Brace, a new product that is designed to resist the lateral forces on a structure caused by events such as earthquakes and high winds, it knew that the product was not covered by the International Building Code (IBC). That’s when it turned to ICC Evaluation Service (ICC-ES) for help.

  ICC-ES, a subsidiary of the International Code Council (ICC), provides technical evaluations of building products, components, methods, and materials. The organization not only helps manufacturers like Weyerhaeuser by producing reports that prove their products meet code requirements and warrant regulatory approval, but also makes it easier for architects and engineers to find innovative products that they know comply with the code.

Mark Johnson, ICC senior vice president of business and product development, says that the services ICC-ES provides enable innovation in the construction industry. Yet he also points out that this idea of enabling innovation seems incongruous to some, given the work that ICC—ICC-ES’s parent organization—performs in developing and maintaining the model building codes adopted by the majority of jurisdictions in the United States.

“When people think of building codes, they normally think of what they can’t do,” says Johnson. But the IBC isn’t the deterrent to innovation that some people believe it to be, he goes on to say, “because there’s a provision in the building code that allows for innovation.”

Johnson is referring to IBC section 104.11, which was designed to encourage the use of products that are not yet explicitly covered in the code. For those products, the section lets manufacturers commission research reports that instead determine code compliance.

“If you’re a manufacturer coming out with an innovative product, and you’re turning that over to code officials, they need to be able to verify that it really complies with the code,” explains Marion Maguire, ICC business development manager. “That’s where that report becomes important. Even though the product is not covered in the code, the report shows that this innovative product actually complies with the code.”

The service offered by ICC-ES helps alleviate the concerns some people have about how building codes make innovation in the construction industry difficult to achieve, says Johnson.

“Instead of the code being static, and basically inhibiting progress, it becomes more dynamic, more flexible, more malleable,” he says. “Now you can get a product out to market and not have to wait for the next three years while you submit code changes and hope that they pass. The codes are updated every three years, so if you come out with a new product, and you have all this money invested in it, you don’t want to wait for three years to see if a code provision is going to be introduced to the model code system. That’s where ICC-ES really makes a difference.”

All manufacturers who have their products evaluated by ICC-ES for code compliance do so voluntarily. They commission the organization to develop their reports, which are then posted on the ICC-ES website at http://www.icc-es.org/Evaluation_Reports/index.shtml

The reports are free for anyone to download, and can be searched based on attributes such as the product or manufacturer, making it easier for people specifying products to find code-compliant materials for a project.

“If you’re an architect or engineer looking for something innovative, and you want to make sure it’s code-compliant, but you can’t find it in the code, you can look at the ICC-ES website and see if there’s a report on it,” says Johnson.

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