A few weeks after losing a round in its bid to build a Wal-Mart Supercenter in Duluth, the company has applied again for permission to deviate from city building codes to construct its store.

Wal-Mart has asked the city for permission to deviate from building codes that pertain to building materials, roof pitch and landscaping.

A city staffer approved similar requests from Wal-Mart a few months ago, but the Duluth Zoning Board of Appeals reversed that decision last month. It ruled that the staffer exceeded her authority and that requests for exceptions to the building code should be decided by the Zoning Board of Appeals.

The board is scheduled to consider Wal-Mart’s most recent requests for three variances on Dec. 19.

Duluth’s zoning ordinance requires building exteriors of “brick, stone, stucco or wood,” but Wal-Mart’s request notes that “there are no definitions of those terms” in the ordinance.

As it argued at a meeting of the Zoning Board of Appeals last month, the retailer said the city’s history of approving “other construction projects . . . that provide the same aesthetic qualities” should be precedent enough. Rather than using traditional brick, Wal-Mart wants to use a colored-masonry product called Quik-Brik.

Duluth’s building code also calls for pitched roofs. Wal-Mart points out that the city has approved other large buildings that “simulated the use of a traditional pitched roof,” as Wal-Mart seeks to do in building a Supercenter at Peachtree Industrial Boulevard and Sugarloaf Parkway. That precedent, Wal-Mart says, should mean that it can use a redesigned roof style that’s in keeping with the appearance of similar buildings in the city.

Lastly, Wal-Mart has asked the city to let it to put a required landscape strip along Sugarloaf Parkway, at the rear of the building, rather than at the level of the road.

This would allow the store to enhance screening on two sides, the application says, and preserve “an existing, natural, vegetative slope. . . in its undisturbed state.”

Granting the request, it says, will allow the store to preserve “200 feet of existing trees along Peachtree Industrial Boulevard” rather than remove them and replant new ones.