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Abstract
In the development of any project, design must fulfil many requirements. The most important are requirements from the client and the authorities. Before a building project can go ahead, plans must be approved by various authorities and one of these is concerned with fire regulations. It is normal for any plans to be amended several times before final approval is given by the authorities. This causes major delays to the progress of a project.
All the material reviewed and analysed shows that many architects fail to integrate the fire safety and fire regulations requirements in the design. Some architects just ignore this matter and rely upon comments from the authority. The general opinion of architects and fire authorities shows that fire regulations or other building regulations should be considered at an early stage of design to avoid any major alterations to the design at the final stage. However, this is not done in current practice. Research shows that architects only considered this aspect at a very late stage of the design process. Disregarding this matter in the early stage of design, means that many requirements have not been complied with, which causes delays in the approval process.
This thesis focuses on this question. It tries to explore and understand the nature of the problems and aims to provide a method to enable architects to consider and integrate building regulations into an early stage of the design process.
Detailed studies have been carried out on building regulations, the architectural design process and the use of the computer in design in order to understand each particular subject and its relationship to the others. In-depth interviews with architects and fire officers were carried out in Malaysia as a case study in order to understand the problems in real practice. A study of building regulations shows that the nature of building regulations themselves is a major factor in making the subject unpopular, they cause constraint and are difficult to use in the design.