Heritage Buildings and BCA Compliance

The Building Code of Australia (BCA) covers current building construction compliance. The majority of heritage buildings were constructed before these codes were put into place. When undertaking adaptive reuse, many heritage buildings will require fire safety upgrades as they don’t always adhere to these codes. Finding fire safety methods that don’t necessitate major alterations to the valuable historic building fabric is often difficult.

The necessity to conserve important building fabric should be taken into account while renovating historic buildings. This may necessitate finding suitable and practicable solutions that partially satisfy the performance provisions of the BCA in order to achieve a suitable level of fire safety. The consent authority usually has discretionary power to approve such fire safety measures at the Development Approval stage. Therefore, it is essential that a comprehensive fire safety package be created for the building depending on the risk level and the importance of the building.

Credwell Consulting can assist in providing a practicable and feasible fire safety upgrade strategy to present to the consent authority at the Development Approval stage which ensures a reasonable level of fire safety whilst minimising the disruption of substantial heritage building fabric.