My understanding is you have to fix this when changing to residential. There are building codes requires to be met for residential housing, and normally that includes openable window space for both ventilation and egress in an emergency. Maybe they'll make an exception for egress, but I doubt they will for ventilation.
Exactly why I would expect them to make an exception for it. Unless the local laws have been changed specifically to allow for that situation, I doubt the laws started out that way though. I don't imagine the people designing building codes for residential living put a lot of thought to extremely tall buildings initially.
This very much depends on where you are. I had an apartment in a high-rise building in Austin TX a few years ago that did not have openable windows of any kind (I also did not realise this until after signing the lease, which was unfortunate). I assume the building met code.
I don’t understand building codes. It’s not safe for people to sleep there, but it’s safe to work there for eight to twelve hours a day? Something is off.
I mean… yes? I don't see what's so confusing. In an office building, if anything goes wrong, an alarm goes off and everyone leaves, and insurance pays for damages. In a residential building, you have people sleeping, sick, possessions they might not be willing to leave behind, babies, pets… It makes sense for the safety requirements to be different.
I'm not sure if you're being lax in your terminology or whether you are misinterpreting my point.
The problem is not that every window needs to open, it's that some windows need to open. In the building codes I've seen in the past for residential homes, that was expressed as a percentage of square feet of the room or entire building.
So, are you saying there are plenty of tall condos where no windows in a specific dwelling open, or that they have some windows that don't open? If they have no windows that don't open, do you mind mentioning where, as I'd be interested in what the solution was to the problem of needing to allow for passive ventilation.
Thanks, that's fairly clear and concise, at least for the locations you noted.
It does appear to be that in New York it might be required though[1], so it's possibly still a problem depending on area. I'm not going to act like I'm an expert on reading building codes or that one in general though, so I could be misinterpreting it. SF had what clearly seemed like a mechanical ventilation exception in it when I just looked, but SF and Manhattan are the only things I looked up to compare to see if I could find whether it seemed fairly universally allowed or not.
Commercial building windows in general do not open at all.