ICC CODES
atelierjones founder Susan Jones represented the American Institute of Architects and its 90,000 architects on the International Code Council (ICC) Tall Wood Building Committee to change the building code to allow tall wood high rise buildings up to 18 stories.
The intense, multi-disciplinary, multi-year committee process included five real-life fire tests at the US Bureau of Alcohol and Firearms Test Facility (ATF) outside of Washington D.C. in 2017. After multiple public testimonies by the Tall Wood Committee during the 2018 ICC Code Hearings, the 2021 International Building Code (IBC) was ratified with the new Type-IV Building types for tall mass timber.
In 2021, Susan then led a small contingent of former ICC Committee members to write and pass further changes to the Type IV-B provision, for submission under the IBC 2024 Code Cycle. These new changes were based on the findings of the 2020 RISE fire tests, where Susan played a key role in developing test protocols, supported by funding from the US Forest Service and American Wood Council.
The Type IV-B code updates were finalized in January 2022. These updates changed the allowable percentage of exposed wood ceilings and beams in Type IV-B buildings from 20% to 100%, representing benefits for cost, carbon, and biophilic beauty in twelve-story tall wood buildings.
An overview of the historic ICC Tall Wood Buildings Code Committee work was published in Forest Products in 2022, and can be found here.
2016-2022
Susan Jones
COLLABORATORS
ICC Tall Timber Ad-Hoc Tall Wood Building Committee, American Wood Council, AIA National
Key Collaborators: Sam Francis, Carl Baldassara, Stephen DiGiovanni, Jon Siu
AWARDS
2018 AIA Seattle Awards - Research Award for ICC Tall Wood Building Code Committee
PUBLICATION
Research and Testing Lead to Historic Code Change - Stenger & Fotheringham, Forest Products, 2022
How a Seattle Architect Helped make Timber Towers Legal in the US — Amanda Kolson, Bloomberg, 2023
“It’s all wood, man” - Antonio Pacheco, The Architect’s Newspaper, 2019
Support for Tall Timber Reaches New Heights in the Building Code - Michael Kilkelly, Architect Magazine, 2018
RELATED PROJECTS
Heartwood
Heartwood Replication
Mass Timber Fire Testing