At present, a clear trend can be seen of a development of the building codes and regulations in many countries towards an increased extent of functionally based requirements and performance criteria. As concerns the design of buildings with respect to fire exposure, an essential step in the direction of such a development was taken in the Swedish Standard Specifications of 1967 by introducing different alternatives of structural fire engineering design, leading to a different degree of accuracy and a different amount of engineering design work. This differentiated view of fire engineering design will be underlined further in the new edition of the standard specifications, planned to come into forceduring 1975.