A building’s structural material together with the Building Occupancy Classification and Use Designation provide the foundation for determining fire safety requirements in the applicable building code. These include matters such as provision of fire sprinklers, building area and height limitations, building separation distances, assembly and material requirements, and many other factors to provide an overall, code-compliance with building code fire safety provisions. This guide focuses only on fire-safety matters related to the use of FPIS-ci, a combustible material, on the exterior walls of a wood frame building (which is a combustible structural material). Therefore, it assumes code compliance has been achieved in all other respects.
The first decision is to determine what building code applies based on the use and occupancy and size of the building. There are two choices: