Managing fire safety design so that it is according to prescriptive standards and accompanies ambient performance is the current challenge for entities dealing with the civil construction industry's standardization. It requires the adhesion of various professional categories and is, in itself, a constant educational process. This work presents an evaluation of the prescriptivity of a set of Brazilian technical standards for fire safety, aiming to measure their likely grade of implementation difficulty for performance in the ambient's design. The prescriptivity analysis was implemented using a discourse analysis technique based on weighing some categories of prescriptive commands against the standard's text. The results indicate that most of the rules have an average degree of prescriptivity (grade II); less than 10% of the ABNT and 30% of the Technical Instructions of Fire Brigades have the highest degree of prescriptivity (grade III), suggesting that performance based on ambient design must be implemented gradually, and should be accompanied by special training in Fire Engineering.
Standardization; prescriptivity; design process; fire safety; performance based design
