Thanks for confirming what I suspected.
The job has become a build first, engineer later type of mess, and I have to work within the abilities/limitations of the current contractor and budget. This was not my job from the start.
I was considering using a reinforced concrete frame, rather than...
In a 2 story building - say 40' L x 20' W with the longer walls being reinforced CMU and the 20' side being spanned by cold formed steel C joists, could the C joists into the CMU wall be counted on at all for lateral force resistance - like a moment frame?
The intent is to have an open floor...
the soil is going to be tested, i was just doing prelim stuff from the code when i noticed the ibv vs nyc thing.
obviously in the end, testing is the going to give the most realistic bearing capacity numbers.
I figured it was something about being on the more conservative end of things... but the differences were so huge that I figured it must be something else.
NYC is the governing code for the project so obviously that is what I would use, I was just nervous about such large discrepancies.
I am at a loss to why I am finding such huge differences between allowable soil bearing capacities in the IBC vs NYC building code.
See the International Building Code table 1804.2 in the below PDF:
http://www-scf.usc.edu/~mosheikh/ibc_chap18.pdf
Table 1804.2 clearly shows gravels as 3000...