ABSTRACT
Building codes in the United States derive principally from English precedents. Their adoption can be understood as acceptance by mid-nineteenth-century Americans of those utilitarian values which made it possible to restrict some individual freedoms, like shoddy building practices, in favour of general health, safety and welfare. The political will to pass such legislation was, no doubt, strongly influenced by a series of devastating fires that damaged or destroyed eleven nineteenth-century American cities and the chronic outbreaks of typhus, yellow fever and smallpox that plagued many other cities (AIA 1990: 9). These crises were inevitably followed by legislation and the founding of institutions intent on eliminating those building practices that would most obviously contribute to repeat fires and epidemics. Historians generally refer to this phenomenon as the era of ‘sanitary reform’ or the ‘public health movement’.
