Tall Wood Buildings: Current Requirements, Recent Innovations, and Future Concerns

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Tall Wood Buildings: Current Requirements, Recent Innovations, and Future Concerns
Sam Francis, AWC Dennis Richardson, American Wood Council

This session will review current Code requirements for wood structures, recent technological innovations in wood structural materials, and various codes that might need to be examined for compatibility with the new technology.

Presented by:

Sam Francis, AWC
Sam Francis is the AWC Director for National Programs, formerly being a Regional Director with AWC (American Wood Council) covering the northeastern United States. He is a CABO certified building official, and has nearly 20 years of experience as a building code official. He also served on the Ohio Construction Industry Certification Board, and the National Construction Code Inspector Certification Program Test Preparation committee. Sam has also been very active with model code organizations. He has served on various committees with BOCA, ICC and NFPA as well as several state committees in the Northeast. Internationally, he has been a member of the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) representing the United States to the International Standards Organization (ISO) for the Technical Committee 92, Subcommittee 4: Fire Safety Engineering, and Technical Committee 59, Subcommittee 17: Sustainability. He has taught extensively on subjects closely related to codes and code development throughout the United States and Canada. He is the author of numerous articles and publications on various building regulation subjects.

Dennis Richardson, American Wood Council
Dennis Richardson joined American Wood Council in January of 2013 after 17 years of being a building official and is a civil engineer registered in California with private sector design and consulting experience in addition to 25 years of building department work. He has been active on several code development and education efforts and has authored a number of code changes on subjects ranging from simplified seismic in the 1997 UBC to a rewrite of the heavy timber provisions in the 2018 IBC. Dennis is a Past President of the Peninsula Chapter of ICC, served on the Board of Directors for the Structural Engineers Association of Central California, and is a graduate of UC Davis with a BS in Civil Engineering