The Construction Specifications Institute and Construction Specifications Canada have released a 2010 edition of UniFormat, a method of arranging construction information based on functional elements, or parts of a facility characterized by their functions, without regard to the materials and methods used to accomplish them.
This new edition harmonizes UniFormat with CSI’s suite of standards and formats, including MasterFormat 2010 and the new PPDFormat. PPDFormat guides the development of preliminary project descriptions, and when used together with UniFormat represents a comprehensive approach to organizing construction information during the design stage.
“With this new edition of UniFormat, estimators and design teams can stay on budget and save time from the point when construction documentation development begins,” said CSI Executive Director and CEO Walter Marlowe, P.E., CSI, CAE. “These updates are the result of hard work by a group of dedicated American and Canadian professionals, and we’re delighted with the result.”
“We’ve been working towards harmonization for five years, and the result will provide tremendous benefits for the construction industry,” said CSC President Corinne Golding, RSW. “In addition to saving time and money, UniFormat 2010 will play an important role in facilitating BIM by organizing data attached to a model during the preliminary design stages.”
- Changes in the 2010 edition of UniFormat include: Moving stairs from Category C Interiors to B Shell.
- Reorganizing Category D Services to reflect more of a systems approach with generic functional categories.
- Providing standardized numbers for Level 4 titles throughout UniFormat.
- Entries to classify “Related Activities” separate from physical elements in the A Substructure and G Sitework elements. These activities may still be included with functional elements as appropriate.
- Placing supplementary components for many functional elements into separate categories to avoid repeating them with each functional element. The “Supplementary Components” can also be included with each functional element in that category as appropriate.
UniFormat breaks a facility into systems and assemblies that perform a predominating function, such as substructure, shell, interiors, and services, without defining the technical solutions to provide these functions. This allows the facility to be priced at the elemental level, allowing design alternatives to be better evaluated, and allows facility performance to be established at the system level as the project design is being refined.
