Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat to create standards to measure floor area

In September, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat will launch a 12-month research project, “Creating Industry-Accepted Criteria for Measuring Tall Building Floor Area.”

The Council aims to identify the aspects of existing codes and regulations that are internationally accepted and the areas where the code and regulations are contentious or are too broad. The most common method to measure a building’s floor area is by using Gross Floor Area (GFA); however, there are other methods, including Gross Internal Area (GIA), Net Internal Area (NIA), Gross Leasable Area (GLA), and Net Rentable Area (NRA).

A project goal is to create varying categories of CTBUH Floor Area Criteria to provide a clear method for accurately and concisely measuring a building’s GFA, NIA, NRA, etc. “Not only will these new criteria provide a method to accurately measure floor areas, but they will complement CTBUH’s existing definitions and criteria surrounding tall buildings,” the Council says.

The project is scheduled to be completed in September 2018.

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