By Steve Rizer
There are several new and significant revisions to MasterFormat, which is used to organize construction documents for commercial, industrial, and institutional building projects in the United States and Canada, according to the Construction Specifications Institute (CSI), the organization that authored the indexing system.
MasterFormat is a master list of numbers and titles classified by work results for construction practices. It is used to organize project manuals, detail cost information, and relate drawing notations to specifications. MasterFormat is credited with fostering fuller and more detailed construction specifications, reducing costly changes and delays in projects due to incomplete, misplaced, or missing information.
In creating the 2014 version of MasterFormat, officials took the following steps, among others:
- Adding “selective demolition” sections to most divisions of the format, providing guidance for companies and project managers who need to incorporate demolition into their plans.
- Renaming Division 40 from “Process Equipment” to “Process Interconnections” and overhauling its content.
- Revising “Equipment” in Division 11 to update, simplify, and rationalize its content and organization.
The ConstructionPro Network member version of this article lists additional changes to MasterFormat and includes comments that CSI Director of Technical Services Greg Ceton made during an interview with ConstructionPro Week.
