IJCA - Volume I - Flipbook - Page 8
8
The International Journal of Conformity Assessment
2022 | Volume 1, Issue 1
9
DOI: 10.55459/IJCA/v1i1/AC
The Cladding Problem: Establishing and
Assessing Safe Building Envelopes
By Abhishek Chhabra, Market Development Manager, Thomas Bell-Wright International Consultants
-ABSTRACTWorldwide, the negative impacts of fire on cladding materials has increased over the years as buildings
grow taller and the complexities of ownership, liability, and responsibilities increase. This paper discusses
how the UAE fire code (UAE Fire and Life Safety Code of Practice) has effectively utilized proven conformity
assessment standards—specifically ISO/IEC 17025, ISO/IEC 17065, and ISO/IEC 17020—to create robust
mechanisms that drastically reduce fire safety hazards for building envelopes.
Keywords: safe building envelopes, building materials, cladding, fire safety, ISO/IEC 17025, ISO/IEC 17065, ISO/IEC 17020, ISO/IEC 17067,
conformity assessment, inspection, fire-rated building materials, UAE Fire and Life Safety Code of Practice
Section A
dedicated to peer-reviewed publications and scholarly articles
.
While the stakeholders of
the construction industry
have juggled their way into
demonstrating quality and safety
of the work delivered until now,
the cladding fire safety problem
has now engulfed governments
and financial institutions too.
The rate at which gaps are being
discovered as major accidents
(e.g., Grenfell, Lacrosse tower,
Address Downtown Dubai hotel,
etc.) is faster that the rate at
which skyscrapers around the
world are growing.
Though some jurisdictions
across the world learned and
implemented interconnected
mechanisms (linking regulations,
building codes, and test
standards) after the fires in the
1980s, the loopholes grow faster
than the gross domestic products
(GPDs) of respective countries.
Evolving conformity assessment
guides offer unbiased and robust
mechanisms to help establish
and assess a (fire) safe building
envelope. This paper touches on
ISO/IEC 17025, ISO/IEC 17065,
and ISO/IEC 17020 and how the
jurisdiction of UAE (civil defense)
is using these to drastically
reduce and control the cladding
fire safety problem.
Cladding System
More than half a century ago,
buildings started to move away
from structural load-bearing
walls to what is now considered
modern construction, allowing
the structure of a building to
grow without load-bearing walls.
This freed the height limits that
were usually set by constraints
of the height of a load-bearing
wall, permitting buildings to grow
taller and taller. This also gave
way to dividing the functions of
a load-bearing wall across many
materials and systems. Along
with the structure, the walls
provided weather barriers (air,
water, and heat) along with other
properties such as acoustics
and “fire.” (See Figure 1.) The
shift was great for giving more
room to creativity, engineering,
architecture, and of course
commerce. An example in Figure
2 is one of probably hundreds of
possible ways in which a building
envelope system undertakes
almost all the functions that were
earlier fulfilled by walls.
Growing Challenges
Architects would like a building
to blend into existing skylines
and sometimes even stand out,
demanding them to be unique.
Art gets a canvas. Then the
building envelope system can
be designed well by knowing
the climatic conditions, seismic
zone, heights, wind loads, etc.
Engineers like to design. Before
Figure 1: Typical functions taken over by the building envelope
