The commissioner of the city’s Department of Buildings, Patricia Lancaster, is speaking tomorrow at the Manhattan Institute on the revision of the building code. The talk, titled “From the Ground Up: Recreating New York’s Building Code,” will focus on the city’s effort to simplify a code that construction experts deem one of the country’s most stringent and complicated.

In the revision effort, 400 experts from the public and private sectors have been poring over the building code for several months, conducting line-by-line comparisons with the International Building Code, or IBC, which has been adopted by 47 states and is widely considered the gold standard.

Because of the city’s unique characteristics, including high levels of population density, widespread bedrock and landfill, and tidal and wind conditions arising from the island locations of four of the five boroughs, the experts have been asked to incorporate those idiosyncrasies into the IBC.

“We won’t adopt the IBC as is, but need to compare each and adopt the best aspects of both codes,” a spokeswoman for the Department of Buildings, Jennifer Givner, said.

The committees – whose meetings are not public – have largely completed their work and expect to submit a new code to the City Council for approval sometime this fall, Ms. Givner said.

Proponents of revising the building code say it will bring down the cost of construction in the city and will enable developers from across the country to operate more easily in the real-estate market.

“Our building code is unique, which can cause problems for anyone from out of town looking to build or design in New York, and this is a major barrier to development,” a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Julia Vitullo-Martin, said.

In 1860 New York became the first city to establish a building code, following a number of devastating fires, including an Elm Street tenement fire that killed 20 people. The infamous 1911 blaze at the Triangle shirtwaist factory in Greenwich Village, which killed 146 workers, spurred revisions of the code, and further revisions were made in 1937 and 1968.

Since the last revision 36 years ago, the code has remained relatively untouched, and reformers say it is time for it to be revised once again.

“The attacks on the World Trade Center focused attention on the building code and the need to make buildings safer,” the executive director of the Building Owners and Managers Association of New York, Bobbi Mc-Gowan, said. “The building code doesn’t reflect many technological advances we have made, including advances in safety, and this should be changed.”