Chicago Unfreezes Its Building Code

by ROBERT LASCH

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IF Chicago can do it, any city can. That is what students of the construction industry are thinking about Chicago’s achievement, after a fiveyear civic struggle, in enacting a modern building code. The nation’s second largest city, long notorious for legal restrictions that raise the cost of housing, now has a building regulation law which, while far from perfect, marks an important advance toward flexible design and method in construction.

Improved building regulation has become a significant question for many cities because the Housing Act of 1949 requires it as a qualification for Federal urban redevelopment funds. Experts have been nibbling at the problem for years. Last year the Building Officials Conference of America, working with Federal housing advisers, drafted a model code which municipal leaders all over the country are now considering. But Chicago is one of the few cities which have acted so far. The most formidable barrier to action is the fear of old-line buildingtrade unions that code revision will jeopardize their interests.

The Atlantic for February, 1945, reported the initial success of Paddy Sullivan, president of the Cook County Building Trades Council, in thwarting Chicago’s effort to rewrite the city building code. As spokesman for the established craft unions of the construction industry, Paddy Sullivan stood watch, year after year, over the old regulations. His frown was so terrible that aldermen quailed at the thought of revising an ordinance which had always protected the vested monopolies of plasterers, masons, and other crafts.

Paddy is still around, but other forces in the community have made themselves felt, and the result is something of a political miracle. For two years, leading aldermen in the City Council, responding to pressure from the building-trade unions, fought a delaying action against revision of the code. They fell back from one prepared position to another, taking their stand finally on the proposition that small-home construction, at least, should be preserved for the status quo. They wanted rules which would keep the Chicago market closed to prefabricated houses, and which would maintain a preferred position for plaster as the chosen material of interior walls.

At the eleventh hour Chicago’s popular Mayor Martin H. Kennelly went to bat for the organized civic interests which were demanding free competition among various materials and construction techniques. By forceful persuasion, by the power of his groat personal prestige, he wrung from the City Council a compromise which, while giving some ground on details, upheld the basic principle of a performance rather than a specification code. The Council passed it unanimously.

It is typical in the history of building codes that municipalities often call in experts to advise them, and then proceed to ignore the experts’ advice. That happened in Chicago once before. After duly noting what architects and engineers considered a technically sound set of regulations, the Council wrote its own set, conforming to what its members considered the political realities. The remarkable thing about the new code is that it does, in fact, embody about 90 per cent of what an expert group of nonpolitical technicians said it should embody.

The leader of this group was John O. Merrill, a Competent and busy Chicago architect whose most notable professional job was the designing of the atomic energy town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Merrill took time out of a crowded life to act as the city’s technical adviser throughout the long, tedious weeks of consultation, negotiation, accommodation, and delay. He had the National Bureau of Standards and many other construction interests looking over his shoulder. He consulted the National Board of Fire Underwriters, the American Standards Association, and more than a hundred representatives of industry. Architects, engineers, specialists from all parts of the country contributed their advice.

For years everything that was wrong with the building industry, everything that kept the cost of housing beyond the average citizen’s reach, everything that froze building into a conventional pattern, had been present in Chicago in its most aggravated form. The advocates of progressive building regulation figured that if they could crack Chicago they could crack the main fortress of restrictive codes.

Behind the city’s appointment of Merrill lay a groundwork of civic preparation. Late in 1945, the Association of Commerce, representing a crosssection of Chicago’s business life, published a report on the code prepared for it by the John B. Pierce Foundation of New York, a housing research organization. Looking at Chicago building regulation with a cold and impartial eye, the outside analysts recommended a complete overhaul. The Association adopted this objective and, backed by three of the city’s four newspapers, pressed it successfully on Mayor Edward J. Kelly and his successor, Mayor Kennelly.

Merrill and his staff, operating under a city appropriation of $105,000, worked for a year on the first phase of the job — the drafting of technical recommendations. Their objective was threefold. First, they wanted a code that would set up performance standards for safety, fire resistance, healthfulness, and so forth, and then permit the use of any materials or methods which met those standards. Second, they wanted to provide for administrative decision as to whether future new materials met these standards — thus attacking the ancient evil of legislative logrolling and favoritism which had grown out of the fact that the old rules could be changed only by the City Council. Finally, they wanted a code which, by setting reasonably liberal though technically sound standards, would encourage the utmost competition in construction and the greatest freedom of innovation and design.

In the ivory tower of their professional world, Merrill and his colleagues had little difficulty arriving at agreement on what a code ideally ought to contain. Swinging the City Council to their point of view was another matter. The Council was acutely aware of the building-trade unions, and its first reaction was to wrap the Merrill recommendations in a smothering blanket of procrastination. At this point a citizens’ building code committee was organized, to mobilize support for Merrill’s work.

Debate over the technicalities of construction is hardly calculated to bring the citizenry pouring into the streets, yet the committee attained a remarkable breadth of representation in its membership. Its chairman was Henry T. Heald, president of the Illinois Institute of Technology, and its vice-chairman Dr. Andrew C. Ivy, dean of the Medical College at the University of Illinois. Constituent organizations ranged from the banks and the Real Estate Board to Hull House, the ParentTeacher Association, the State Street Council, and the Catholic Women’s League, The committee raised a modest kitty and hired a City-Hall-wise newspaperman to run the office. It was a new kind of lobby, Composed mostly of “do-gooders” who had no axe to grind except the conviction that Chicago needed an aggressive housing program, of which improved building regulation was one vital aspect.

The opposition, headed by Byron Dalton, boss of the plasterers’ union, pitched its case on the issue of fire prevention. Dalton talked for hours on end before the aldermanic committee. He evoked memories of the great Chicago fire, he told and retold the story of the LaSalle Hotel fire, he painted heart-rending pictures of hapless families wiped out in burning homes. But he never quite convinced the public that his interest was humanitarianism rather than a protected market for the plastering trade. He never quite sold the idea that all fires take place in unplastered structures, or that a plastered wall is indispensable to a safe dwelling. The Citizens Committee could and did point out that the town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, built to house workers in the atomic plants there, had won an underwriters’ award for the lowest rate of fire hazard in the country — and Oak Ridge is a dry-wall, plywood town.

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IN LARGE measure the fire prevention issue was a false one. The code which Merrill proposed and which the Citizens Committee backed actually stiffened the precautions against fire in many instances. What it did not do was to impose the same kind of fire prevention standards upon all the diverse sections of the city. It did not require that small single-family homes, adequately spaced in outlying districts, meet the requirements set down for congested apartment blocks in the teeming center. It look the sensible view that fire hazards in a twenty-story hotel and in a one-story dwelling are not identical, and that building regulations need not be drawn as if they were. Above all, the Merrill forces insisted that wherever the public interest called for fire prevention standards, these should be defined in performance terms. The code was to specify that certain walls be built of any material capable of resisting fire for one hour — not that they contain eight inches of masonry or be finished with three coats of plaster.

One immediate result of putting the code on this basis is that Chicago builders will now have a choice among some eighty materials or combinations of materials, whereas the old code limited the range to about a dozen. As new materials are developed, they will qualify for use if they meet the technical standards set up. Heretofore, a new material had to be approved by the Council and amended into the law to be legal.

Architects believe that some of the greatest benefits will arise from the new freedom of design and engineering thus made possible. In large buildings, for example, the old code used to require that every exterior wall have a fire resistance of four hours, which in practice meant that it had to be built of masonry eight inches thick. You could build the wall of glass and call it a window, in which case you need not meet the four-hour requirement. The rule did not, therefore, actually produce structures which would resist fire for four hours. What it did was to produce structures containing a large amount of heavy masonry. That may have been appropriate in the days when buildings were fashioned by laying one brick on top of another, but the typical form of modern construction is the skeleton type, where the weight is carried by structural columns and the only function of the intervening “curtain” or panel walls is to keep out the weather.

The new code permits these exterior wall panels to be built of material that will resist fire for one hour instead of four. With proper insulation they might be built of steel, aluminum, or other relatively light materials. The savings possible in a large building — savings not only of labor cost but the compounded economies arising from a drastic reduction of weight for the whole structure — could be tremendous.

Chicago is an apartment-house town. Rental housing is the greatest need, and the construction of rental housing has for years been the greatest deficiency. Although construction costs were not the only reason for the long stagnation, the new code may have its most significant effects in this field. The old ordinance required builders to do many things which added to their troubles and their costs. Every wall separating the individual apartment from the rest of the building had to be a masonry wall; now it can be built of suitably fire-resistant material sheathing both sides of lumber studding. Every apartment building of any description had to have two exits; now it will be possible to build two-story garden apartments with one exit for four families — a type of dwelling which permits flexible planning and reduced costs. Under the old code every apartment building had to be of the same heavy construction, whether it was four stories or twenty stories high. The new law permits a lighter type of fire-resistant construction for buildings less than five stories high.

The bitterest controversy centered upon the rules to be laid down for construction of small single-family houses in the outlying sections of the city. Here the plasterers’ Byron Dalton and his aldermanic friends dug in. The pre-war code had given the plasterers a monopoly on interior walls of small houses. The wartime emergency code, adopted under Federal government pressure to speed the construction of war housing, had required the use of plaster or one substitute — halfinch gypsum board. Merrill and his committee of experts wanted to throw open this phase of construction to all kinds of competing wall materials. The compromise engineered by Mayor Kennelly will permit the use of plaster, gypsum board, and other materials which meet the test for flame spread.

Theoretically, the new regulations will permit the erection of prefabricated homes in Chicago for the first time. But the most important result will probably be that manufacturers, knowing what the rules are, may now recognize some inducement to produce new wall materials.

The new code is about one-third the length of the old one, and seeks to regulate the basic essentials of construction rather than every minute detail. It makes full use of the authoritative agencies in the building industry whose standards are generally accepted as representing sound engineering practice. For reinforced concrete, the standards adopted by the American Concrete Institute are taken over. For steel, builders are referred to the specifications of the American Institute of Steel Construction. All materials approved and rated by the National Board of Fire Underwriters are automatically acceptable under the code.

For years the construction industry has pleaded for uniformity in municipal building legislation, so that the benefits of standardization could be realized. Here is a beginning. If other cities follow Chicago’s example, shaping their local regulations on nationally accepted standards, the time may yet come when building is subject to substantially the same minimum requirements, allowing for regional differences, everywhere in the country. Such a step toward reducing the excessive localization of the industry could be a long stride toward rationalization and significant cost reduction.

In any case Chicago, for one, now has a building law which immeasurably simplifies the regulatory process, which encourages instead of throttling competitive construction methods, which frees builders from outworn restrictions appropriate to a bygone age, which opens the way to an ultimate reduction of costs that can bring good housing within the reach of more people. Looking at the formidable obstacles which once blocked this civic achievement, other communities may well reflect: If Chicago can do it, any city can.