INTRODUCTION OF HENNING ORLANDO

CHARLES MAHAFFEY

Our next speaker, Mr. Henning Orlando, is a man who is quite familiar with the whole building standards picture. He is the Managing Director of the Building Standards

Institute in Sweden.

Mr. Orlando is a distinguished member of the American Cryptogram Association, and his hobby is developing secret communication codes. He is considered to be one of the top twenty experts in the world in this particular subject area. That gives you some idea of Mr. Orlando's quick wit and his ability to grasp large problem areas and reduce them to the essence.

Henning Orlando was born in France in 1914. After graduating as an architect from the University of Stockholm in 1940, he was engaged in the practice of architecture for almost 25 years. In 1967, he became Managing Director of the Swedish Building Standards Institute.

Mr. Orlando has been a member of the advisory council of the Swedish National Board of Building and Urban Planning since 1969, and a member of the International Modular Group since 1968. Also, Mr. Orlando is Chairman of Subcommittee 11 (which deals with kitchen equipment) of ISO Technical Committee (TC) 59. Henning also is Chairman of ISO TC59, Subcommittee 6, Working Group 4, which is attempting to develop international standards for stairs and staircases; he is the Chairman of ISO Technical Committee 10, Subcommittee 8, whose responsibility it is to develop international standards for the building drawing practices. The Swedish Building Standards Institute holds the Secretariat for a surprisingly large number of ISO technical committees and subcommittees, and Mr. Orlando will touch on that in his talk.

Mr. Orlando will give us a picture of building standardization in Sweden and of how dimensional coordination fits into that particular subject area. Will you join me in welcoming Mr. Henning Orlando.

BUILDING STANDARDS DEVELOPMENT IN SWEDEN

AND IN THE METRIC BUILDING WORLD

HENNING ORLANDO

INTRODUCTION

Lennart Bergvall told you that he was very honored to be here with you. I am also very honored, because this is my first visit to the United States. It is a great pleasure for me to be in your very great and famous country.

While my fried Lennart has taken you up into the higher spheres of modular coordination, I will try to get you down to the ground again and show you which are the practical problems we are working with today.

STANDARDIZATION

Standardization has been defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as follows:

"The process of formulating and applying rules for an orderly approach to

a specific activity, for a benefit, and with the cooperation of all concerned
and, in particular, for the promotion of optimum order and economy, taking
due account of functional conditions and safety requirements, based on
consolidated results of science, technology and experience, determining not
only a basis for the present but also for future development."

Well, that says quite a lot, but how does it really work in practice? After standardizing in building for about 35 years in Sweden, we still are asking ourselves: "What is standardization? Are we on the right track? How can we do better? What is going to be

done next?"

Perhaps, standardization means avoiding a situation such as shown in Figure 1.

Or, perhaps to get things around the human model more coordinated, as demonstrated in Figure 2.

It is surely not a question of trying to get the results indicated in Figure 3.

For hundreds and thousands of years, the human body has been the outline for all measuring, and you are likely to recognize this famous drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, reproduced in Figure 4.

This foot

Even before da Vinci, the human body was a start for standardization and coordination. Once, in a country somewhere, the people asked their king to give a footprint. print was then used as a standardized size.

That was the first "national" standard. But unfortunately, this method worked differently from country to country. Figure 5 shows that the foot could vary from 279 mm in Mexico to 513 mm in Italy Incidentally, the Swiss foot happened to be exactly modular, 300 mm or 3 M.

Iand this was even before Mussolini.

THE COMPLEXITY OF STANDARDIZATION

The coordination of components has to be considered one of the most important tasks in building standardization, because components must fit together in a building. Modular coordination, therefore, is of main importance. But, there are also many other matters which need to be standardized. Let us, for example, choose a simple door. There are a lot of things happening around that door which, nowadays, we are endeavouring to standardize.

Figure 6 shows some of the major aspects.

Starting with the coordinating sizes 21 M

(2100 mm) for the height and 9 M (900 mm) for the width--which are basic--a series of different properties connected with regulations and performance specifications are internationally interesting subjects to standardize. That simple door shows the complexity of standardization and the need for a systematic approach to all these different issues.

THE SYSTEMATIC APPROACH

We have been trying to find out which kinds of structured approaches we need to define what we are going to standardize. One, which has been used in Sweden, is to start out with dimensions, quality and test methods. This is shown diagrammatically in Figure 7.

Another way could be to base the structuring on the different kinds of components as they are defined within buildings, as illustrated in Figure 8.

A SYSTEM OF LEVELS

But this is not enough to illustrate a complete base for structuring building standardization work as a whole.

In Sweden, we have worked out what we call a "system of levels." This system has been tested and applied in our standardization work for many years, and now also has been accepted by ISO Technical Division 3 as a tool to be used in international building standardization, that is, in all ISO committees concerned with building matters, materials, etc. The concept is summarized in Figure 9.

In building standardization, the most important aspect is modular coordination, because that technique provides us with the framework to standardize components so that they fit together in buildings. An example--dimensioning of windows--will show how this system is used.

On Level 1, Fundamental Standards Dealing with General Principles we have the basic module, 1 M = 100 mm, the multimodules 3 M, 6 M, 12 M, etc. We also have a standardized series of preferred modular and multimodular dimensions, from which sizes may be chosen for special needs.