Creating Industry-Accepted Criteria for Measuring Tall Building Floor Area

The entire tall building industry relies on floor-area measurements to serve as a precise, unambiguous calculation to guide decisions. This can range from architects using the measurement to influence design interventions and engineers formulating the loads on their systems, to developers determining the value of their assets and property managers analyzing the efficiency of building components. Unfortunately, the measurement systems for determining his floor area are not consistent across all markets, which creates a massive gap in the ability to compare projects across time and location, preventing evaluation of the success of one project against another, and making it difficult to build upon industry decisions made in the past. Work to create floor-area measurement standards that are accepted internationally is underway, but there is hesitancy from investors, governing bodies, and professionals that have used different methods for many years. This paper, one of the outputs of a one-year research project funded by ArcelorMittal, examines some of the problems with existing, local regulations, and presents the progress that has been made towards a globally-accepted standard