NFPA Journal - September/October 2019 - 47

Challenge:
Adjacent building and firewalls 

L

IKE MANY URBAN SITES, the
Museum of the Bible is on a constrained
site, with train tracks to the south, roads
to the north and west, and a neighboring
building, the Washington Office Center, to
the east. Back-to-back two-hour fire barriers between
the museum and the office center provide the
required party wall separation.
Fitting the entire museum, including the conference facilities and scholar-in-residence housing, into
the historic cold storage building was not possible,
despite the new construction above the historic
structure and the infill addition of below-grade and
vertical circulation space. The adjacent roads and
railroad tracks prevented horizontal additions, leaving no space to expand the building footprint.
The adjacent Washington Office Center was under
the same ownership as the historic structure, however, which provided a unique opportunity to expand
the museum into-or, more accurately, onto-the
adjacent office center. A new floor now provides
space for lectures and housing for visiting researchers and is connected to the rest of the museum by
a new elevator. Although the new floor serves the
museum, it is part of the office center, both from a
legal and a code perspective.
While the DC Building Code prohibits openings
in a party wall between buildings on separate lots,
it does permit designers to propose alternative
approaches that provide an equivalent level of safety,
much like Section 1.4 in NFPA 101®, Life Safety
Code®. We were able to obtain such an equivalency
to allow passage between the museum space and the
new floor above the office center through the city's
pre-design review meeting (PDRM) process, which
brings designers and reviewers together early in the
project so that key issues can be resolved before the
final permit review. These range from prescriptive
provisions in the code that explicitly require AHJ
approval, such as campus-style electrical feeds for
fire pumps, to requests for equivalent approaches to
prescriptive requirements, such as the openings in
the party wall requested as part of this project. The
reviewers involved could be limited to a single discipline or span the entire range, from fire protection to
civil to zoning.
In our case, the discussion at the PDRM led to an
approved equivalency that required additional firerated opening protectives at the elevator, a covenant
agreement that would grant access to museum space
in the Washington Office Center in perpetuity-even
if it is sold to a future owner-and an additional
elevator that firefighters could use to access the new
floor directly from the office center's lobby. This
additional elevator is critical because fire department

response to any alarm in the new conference or residential space would be to the office center's lobby,
rather than the primary elevator located on the
museum side that staff and scholars use to access the
added floor.
By participating in the PDRM process, we were
able to work through the concept with the AHJ early
in design, helping to reduce the risk that a fully developed concept would be denied during the permit
review. The early feedback from the city also allowed
the owner's legal team to establish the necessary
covenants prior to permit submission, rather than
waiting for a review comment that would then hold
up permit issuance. As a result, construction began
on time and the museum was delivered on schedule.

N F PA . O R G / J O U R N A L * NFPA JOURNAL

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NFPA Journal - September/October 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NFPA Journal - September/October 2019
