Could housing be cheaper and better if we stop building so many staircases?
slate.com
slate.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Osaka_building_fire
> The victims gasped for air and had difficulties escaping, as there was only one escape route, with the emergency stairs and elevators being located outside the clinic.
> Experts were surprised by the fire's high death toll. The authorities are investigating how victims became trapped and the floor filled up with smoke so quickly.
> Minister for Internal Affairs and Communications Yasushi Kaneko ordered the inspection of some 30,000 buildings in Japan that have three or more floors, but only a single stairwell.
When you have someone deliberately setting fires and blocking the escape routes with a knife, you have bigger problems than just one stairwell.
The software world is well versed in the concept of a single point of failure, and the importance of eliminating it and mitigating any chance.
And yet here we are downplaying a critical design problem because it was a single point of failure?
A "crazy trap-setting knifeman attack" is not the only scenario that results in a blocked exit trapping people inside the building in a life-threatening situation. Think about it for a second. Imagine, for instance, that a fire breaks out for any reason. Is this unthinkable? And how do you factor in emergency response personnel trying to go up the same stairs that are the only way out of people trapped in the building?
We should not forget past lessons for no reason.
Yes, past lessons should be remembered but it looks like there is no data that would support building double staircases in reality - it's just too rare of a problem. Same reason why almost nowhere in the world requires outside fire exits like many buildings in NYC do - they are great in idea and I'm sure there are examples of them saving lives, but it's not worth making them a requirement for every building ever made.
Keep in mind that the bread and butter of engineering is "extremely rare circumstances".
In civil engineering, infrastructure is designed with 100 year floods and 50 year seismic events in mind.
Blocking the only exit does not come even close to be a rare event.
Part of modern US stairwell regulation also learned from 9/11, where they found out it wasn't a great idea to have all the required stairwells very close to each other either.
That’s a whole lot better than 1 stairwell!
Anyway. Most of the world does not go up in flames regularly, despite having not having this regulation.
Some folks would get stuck and not get out, but it generally requires dedicated eyes on a crowd if you want to keep them inside something for any length of time. Hence prison guards, locks being a dedicated profession, etc.
Let's say a lot of them are garbage and you only hear about the rare occasions it works. Let's say 10% of the time the fire is good enough to kill.
Two stair wells means only 1% of the time you get a kill.
Lighting two fires is also harder, you need more planning and stuff. So that probably equals out a bit for the better fire lighters.
If it's Mossad doing it then sure it's possibly similar.
Don't really need to be an expert in starting fires.
Certainly not impossible, but it requires more craftiness and more prep the more complicated we get.
Which hopefully there aren’t that many folks who are likely to do so. And if someone does, we can catch them fast.
Basic redundancy is a good idea (n=2) in general, for many many reasons. Maintenance doesn’t take out the only way out for instance, or a single fight or accident doesn’t leave someone stuck.
N=5 is probably overkill for anything for a huge convention center.
How many house fires are there? How many of them are in tall buildings? How many of them would block just one stair, and not two?
Yes, there is a probability that an extra stair will save your life; however, this is a very tiny probability, against a certainty of extra living space, for everyone, every day.
I hate the space argument because its a money argument, not a real quality of life issue - make the building 1 floor taller, or don't cram your residents just because you wanted to milk 4 apts instead of 3 on a floor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_building_or_structure_...
We can also see if mass casualty fires in buildings stopped happening after the regulation change.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn_Theatre_fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
https://www.nytimes.com/1860/02/03/archives/calamitous-fire-...
You realize that this would mean the three residents would have to pay more for their unit, right? It isn’t just developers “milking” condo buyers or tenants. It has to do with efficiency.
We would have many new cars for 4-digit prices if not for the large number of safety systems required on cars.
And buildings in North America are often framed out of the same material that they burn in their fireplaces.
Both present inherent dangers. Both have widespread safety regulations for this reason.
Vehicle accidents are the 2nd leading cause of accidental death in the US and fires are 6th. And this is the result of many decades of both being highly regulated.
People still die in scary numbers there no matter the regulations.
Cars can't be made safer anymore. 60Mphs frontal collisions have single digit percentage survivability chance because physics.
Homes can be made much safer by building them differently.
A lot of those people live in seismically active areas. While modern masonry construction is certainly safer than traditional masonry, in general wood is far less dangerous than stone or brick in an earthquake.
Cars can absolutely be made safer. They certainly haven’t stopped getting safer yet.
It's not the speed that kills you, it's the impact. Multifloor buildings are designed to help you live and work at a height that can kill you, and to prevent air entering and escaping which can kill you.
If you can assume that the risk of fire or collapse isn't worth mitigating against, why not assume that a car will never hit anything?
For example, if I can cram 14 windowless apartments into the same floor, is it really unfair that that 4 tenants would have to pay more than the 14?
A circular shape with one exit it's much harder to be stuck into by a single ignition point.
No one should be surprised that fire safety laws are going to the extreme for safety at a large cost to floor space.
On a totally different note, I can't find any cheap or affordable new cars. Am looking for basic wheels without finicky gadgets like backup cameras and tire pressure monitors and lane departure warnings. Something simple and without high insurance costs to cover all those gadgets I don't need.
I wonder why things (house, car) seem unaffordable and contain gadgets which are difficult to fix and which increase insurance costs. What happened America?
And the still working quite far back vehicles are pretty valuable because they have stood the test of time and don’t have all the buzzword crap, so folks don’t want to part with them.
The old cheap ones also got fed into a grinder (essentially) for cash for clunkers.
If fire advocates really cared they would figure out the rules to follow and that would make it much cheaper for everyone.
Why wouldn't you be able to compare statistics from the US to any other country that doesn't have that rule?
I'm also guessing that fire reporting doesn't include the level of detail you would need. For example, a fire in which firefighters were able to tackle from two sides would be quickly extinguished, where as the same fire with 1-sided access might have become a disaster. But thats a what-if, only learned the hard way.
You need to go back and read the article more closely. It's a HUGE quality of life issue; mainly US building codes restrict apartments to one side of the building which has all kinds of implications - cross airflow, alignment of rooms with the sun - and the ability to have more variety of sizes of units to better meet needs that currently go unmet, especially with families.
I mean if you look at the article the majority of it is all about quality of life - not only for the apartments, but greater/more effective use of the stairwells and common areas.
That's the weirdest euphemism for murder I've ever seen.
I don't believe he killed his son, and I believe the wording in the articles is intended to indicate that he tried to force his son to kill himself and ended up stabbing him in the head.
Good point. But to be fair, you should consider the injuries and deaths caused by elderly falling off stairs - 1M injuries, 12,000 deaths in the US alone. [0]
Compared that with 3,700 deaths and 16,600 injuries for ALL fires, not just fires in buildings [1].
My view would be that stairs KILL, and that new buildings should avoid stairs (at least, within a single unit) at all costs. We should also rethink how we design stairs and stair safety, and adjust building codes accordingly. Of course, this will most likely never happen.
[0]: https://www.attorneywdkickham.com/stairway-staircase-acciden....
As to fire, that is but one of many other safety concerns, I personally will never live in a place that only has 1 escape vector, even if fire concerns were mitigated
And in response to Grenfell, the argument is tenants don't like fire drills; just wow. Eventually everyone forgets the reason for regulations...is there a named law for this phenomenon?
Is “stay in your flat while the building burns down around you” a common fire safety plan in the UK? Because that seems scary as hell. And also negligent.
There’s certainly scenarios in which you might need to evacuate, like a bomb threat, but we are speaking about internal fire, in which case there’s more danger in hundreds of people fleeing in panic down stairs (whether that’s 1 stair case or 2) than staying inside.
24 stories of Grenfell were engulfed in an hour - the fire bypassed the doors, walls and floors, by going up the outside.
> The building would never be on fire
The entire building was on fire. 72 people died.
> The problem with Grenfell was that building regulations had been violated, at which point, all bets about safety are off.
Mistakes get made. Hence redundancy, like two staircases. If you're going to design for 'no mistakes ever made' then don't bother with any fire systems as a fire is a mistake in the first place.
Because the exterior was flammable, which isn't the norm and is actually criminal.
So is arson. Newsflash: sometimes people do criminal things.
But we try to design to cope with it rather than just saying ‘but they aren’t allowed to start that fire so no need to guard against it.’
And it turned out it was the norm, hence the huge panic to fix it in so many buildings.
Is there? I’ve never seen people panic when a fire alarm goes off. Maybe if the fire alarm is going off as the building is filling with deadly smoke people would panic. But then that seems appropriate (or at least better than sitting and waiting to die of smoke inhalation).
Pretty sure the Grenfell situation would have ended better by having everyone evacuate. And yes, the incompetent cladding work makes that a special case. But a huge amount of our codes are for a special case. Every so often it saves 70 lives.
If the concrete and fire doors are doing their supposed job, then the fire brigade can just wait. If the concrete and fire doors are not doing their job, then getting people out is far more important than getting the fire brigade in.
Wait until the people in the apartment on fire die? (Either it starts in an apartment, or a common are which would block the escape of inhabitants living on there or higher)
The South Tower had one remaining stairwell survive impact and 18 people were actually able to evacuate from above the impact zone, which is actually pretty impressive when you consider that the impact was on floors 77-85, and the people who called emergency services were told to stay in place. One of the survivors was actually only 20 feet (6 m) from the left wing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Praimnath
That being said, a lot of fire codes and related legislation had to be updated in the wake of 9/11. Among the many other dumb things:
* the stairwells were all extremely close to each other. In the North Tower they were 70 ft (21 m) apart and in the South Tower they were 200 ft (60 m) apart, which is probably why one stairwell survived in the South Tower and none did in the North.
* stairwells were only surrounded by drywall instead of concrete, which is another contributing factor to why so many of them were rendered inoperable. If you're not familiar with drywall, you can literally punch a hole through it with your arm.
* stairwells were built with a 44 inch width because it was assumed that the average person had a shoulder to shoulder width of 22 inches (55 cm). This slowed down evacuation a lot.
* the fire code was incorrect. the building was only half full but took much longer to partially empty than a full evacuation of the full occupancy tower was projected to take. so codes were revised.
* there were not enough stairwells according to code. but how might this be? well, the owner and constructor, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is a federally created entity, and so is not actually subject to local fire codes. (This last point wasn't actually addressed; they're still not actually required to follow NYC fire codes, but they did at least do so for the new iteration of the towers.)
* In a previous attack on the WTC, people were evacuated from the roof, but since that incident the roof doors were locked to prevent base jumpers from gaining access.
https://www.history.com/news/world-trade-center-stairwell-de...
Cancer outrage? You get the California meaningless stickers.
Police brutality? Racism? You get polarizing protests and no real change.
Outrage is at best the first step. But it's really the sign of decades (or more) of gridlocked politics.
I mean, think of all the wasted space and weight having 8 exit doors on a airplane; they don't crash often
And if we had all doors except one passenger seat, it might be even safer.
We neither optimize for absolute highest survival rate nor for absolute highest convenience/efficiency.
The question is-- how much does the second staircase improve survival? Is it the most economic way to get that survival difference?
If we could choose to fly on the same plane with 4 doors that would give us more legroom and get us to our destination in less time, I believe a lot of us would make that choice.
If there were fewer doors there would me more seats, and the weight of the seat, passenger, and luggage would far outweigh the weight saving on the door.
And no, you ain't getting more legroom.
At least, not enough to make your flight measurably shorter.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/47369/how-is-th...
seriously, who is pushing this weird anti-fire-code agenda and why is it in slate
Why its in slate is confusing, especially since the article definitely has a pro stance, with little research to back it up
why is questioning a regulation that already lacks evidence for its efficacy requires research?
it's plenty of research to point at the other parts of the world that is not in flames despite higher urban density and only one egress per unit.
"This website is a tool to make sense of the wicked problem of the second egress in Canada and prepare a building code change."
It is super biased, and the bigger issue is that it is impossible record what-if situations like how many minor US fires could have been major tragedies if they had a single stair instead of two, and firefighters could tackle a fire from two sides.
Just looking at one of their sources even states that rapid smoke/fire in stairways and vertical opens is a significant portion blocked-escape deaths
-- https://cjr.ufv.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Murdoch-Univer...
Another for canada clearly says a majority of deaths are "trapped-by" -- http://nfidcanada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Fire-statist...
This whole fire (and building) safety code problem is that it's driven by superstition instead of data. It mandates certain solutions instead of outcomes. (Eg. the railing spacings to prevent kids from being able to fall through.)
Many developed countries have similar outcomes without the same strictness of code, plus housing is so overregulated in so many ways it's no wonder that many people argue for shifting the set-point in these trade-offs in order to help more people to have housing.
Of course ideally society would address poverty so there trade-off between safety and other aspects would be just academic.
The risk you avoid by reducing driving is much, much higher than the risk you avoid by having a second staircase in your building. People choose money/comfort over security all the time, but then act like making that choice is absurd and only a monster would do it.
But people living in the city in apartments within walking distance of their workplace go far fewer kilometers per day.
I spent a couple unfortunate years commuting some 160 km per day (by car). No one walks or bikes that far every day.
If a fire in my neighbours apartment meant I needed to escape, certainly an extra egress point would be nice, but the solution to that problem seems to be… better fire isolation.
[1] The grenfell disaster (mentioned by the article) was so deadly because people sheltered in place as instructed… but that building had been modified without following regulations.
"Stay in a building that's actively on fire, don't worry, people will come and take care of it!" sounds, to me as an American, like utter insanity. If the building is capable of withstanding it and the correct techniques are applied quickly, great, but "not in the building" is my strongly preferred place to be in the event of any sort of structure fire/damage/etc.
It's not that it can't work - it's just that when something major has gone wrong, history tends to show that lots of other things end up going wrong as well. Also, that "The building as designed" and "The building as built, after 40-50 years in service," frequently don't share as much as one might hope in terms of safety features.
There's a long recorded history of structure fires that have destroyed supposedly "fireproof" buildings. We might know more now, but in a battle between Murphy and engineering hubris, Murphy seems to find a lot of ways to win.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1945_Empire_State_Building_B-2...
Certainly, there's disasters where multiple catastrophic failures result in horrific outcomes, but if we design policy around "absolute safety is impossible, so run" then we'll be less safe and more anxious. The safest buildings are big well-managed apartment buildings with shelter in place policies, because robust strategies that have been implemented from the ground-up are always going to beat half-baked strategies implemented based on an approximate understanding of single family home building regulations.
As glib as it is to acknowledge, apartment buildings are so safe because safety is built on the back of loss. I am benefiting from the lessons learned from every disaster that has come before.
17% of the US lives in a rural area. 32% of the US population is covered by a volunteer fire department. There are plenty of suburbs with VFDs, often lower-income.
https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Data-research-and-too...
And don't expect the volunteers to accomplish much--when the alarm goes off they have to go to the firehouse first, and thus will have a bad response time compared to a professional fire service. They're far more about keeping the fire from spreading than actually putting it out.
Similarly, the standard instruction for earthquakes is "stop drop and hold", since the advice has to be fully general, covering all people in all circumstances, including highrises where evacuation is not possible. But I live in the ground floor of a not particularly well-built four story apartment building; my desk is eight feet away from an outside door. If there's an earthquake, I'm leaving!
One option is staircases (aimed at reducing mass casualty events in fires). There are other options to improve fire safety. There are other options to improve safety in other circumstances.
Perhaps with the costs of second staircases, there are things we could do to buildings for less money that would save more lives from fire. Should we do both? Just the cheaper one? Neither?
How do we decide which ones are justified for their cost, and which ones aren't? Who should bear these costs? What things should be grandfathered and have a slow transition towards higher safety? What things should be immediately improved?
The answer to the staircase question comes down to how we answer questions like this. And the fact that we may be tolerating much bigger risks is definitely an interesting point.
But I have A question from your PoV as a resident if London w/ more "on the ground knowledge" outside of normal media reports: What happened with Grenfell tower to go so wrong?
> there’s no evidence that Americans and Canadians are any safer from structure fires than our neighbors around the world
Scott Alexander's recent article made me sensitive to the phrase "no evidence". https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence.... Alexander writes:
> Science communicators are using the same term - “no evidence” - to mean:
> 1. This thing is super plausible, and honestly very likely true, but we haven’t checked yet, so we can’t be sure.
> 2. We have hard-and-fast evidence that this is false, stop repeating this easily debunked lie.
> This is utterly corrosive to anybody trusting science journalism.
I rather suspect that having independent two exits from the building does make us safer during a fire, and that this article simply represent lazy unprofessional journalism. The thorough lack of outsider opinions (from anybody other than the author and the subject of the article) strongly reinforces this initial impression.
Burden of proof is a key idea I think - though sometimes it can be hard to ascertain where that should lie.
I dont think its unreasonable to want very safe buildings but clear that by the rules staying the same means they are using a different risk calculation then when they were created.
I wouldn't be so sure. Fire prevention methods have improved, but instead of booking the safety gains, this has been seen as a reason to allow wooden structures that previously would not have been legal to build (the famous 5-over-1).
I'm also fairly certain that better fire retardant materials are used now and that's why wooden structures are allowed.
Source: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trend-in-US-fire-deaths-...
most residential structures are wood frame, even apartment buildings are often just a few wooden-frame stories on top of a single-story concrete podium.
internal firewalls are probably the most significant improvement. you still don't want to be trapped on the wrong side of one with no way down.
(In hindsight I did have other options, but this was my first fire and I didn't know what to do.)
Based on my experience, my one very general piece of advice that everyone should take into account is this: figure out if there are any "single points of failure" in your escape plans. That is, is there a single location where a fire could start that would block ALL your escape routes? In my case, the fire was on a first floor apartment across the hall from the elevator, between the two staircases, and also directly below my apartment's fire escape, so this single fire blocked all 4 of my easy escape routes. If you identify such a situation, think about what you will do if a fire does start there.
All that said, here are some things I could have done, which I came up with after the fact. Obviously I haven't tested any of these, so take them with a grain of salt:
Break into someone else's apartment and use their fire escape on another side of the building.
Find a way up to the roof and walk across to the other side of the building, which has its own separate hallway with 2 staircases and an elevator. Alternatively, I could have tried to break through my bedroom wall into the adjacent unit, which connects to the other side hallway.
If it came to it, I probably could have got my quilt soaking wet in the bathtub, draped it over top of my body for protection, held my breath, and sprinted down the stairs and out of the building. It turned out that while the smoke was going up both staircases, the fire was limited to only a single apartment unit, although of course I didn't know this at the time.
Outdoors, the fire was only blocking the staircase side of the fire escape. I could have descended down the other side of the fire escape by hanging down off the side and dropping down to the floor below me, one floor at a time, and then jumping down to the ground.
I have a long rope in my closet that I could have tied to my radiator and let out my bedroom window on the other side of the building. This would have been quite risky, because there's a lot of unknowns: How much weight can the radiator hold? How much can the rope hold? Am I strong enough to support my weight with my arms on a rope?
Lastly, it turns out you're unlikely to die from jumping out a 4th story window. (International note: 4th story is 3 floors up from the ground level floor) You're not terribly likely to walk away from it either, but a broken leg is better than dying in a fire.
The fire was raging near the only stairway. It was the only access firemen had. The young kid was dead.
"Seattle-based architect Michael Eliason" is a complete idiot.
He points out that the long corridor type of building you are describing is often caused by the need to make a Teo staircase build financially viable.
Anyhow, funny story regarding dead people after a fire. He jumped out of a balcony. The fire was in his apartment. The firefighters were already at the door. It turns out the dude was off his meds. (Or never on them.) Because no one gives a shit about mental health. But maybe let's mandate bars on balconies so people can't jump out.
I’m sure a statistical analysis could be constructed to justify the decision to eliminate two stairwells. I wouldn’t be interested in living there.
I did most of my thinking on paper and used sketchup to visualize, check measurements, etc. We were dead-set with sticking to a budget and I think it really allowed us to maximize the utility per square foot.
It might be interesting.
Having two young girls at the time i wanted to avoid that. We also built out in the middle of the woods and i wanted to maximize our mobility in case anyone decided they could break in without getting caught (in fact you could bulldoze our house without getting caught) Everything else flowed from that.
One interesting side effect is that i can put an exhaust fan in a window of my office and by closing select doors can pull fresh air through the entire house by cracking two other windows open.
So that's floor space saved: https://i.imgur.com/Z9OdYkE.png
And if it's acceptable to combine staircase and hallway, as long as there's another staircase available, you can do even better: https://i.imgur.com/Wa7p4sy.png
The second might be too risky, but I don't think the first one adds any risk.
Except, you know, all the tenants above the first floor scrambling for their lives on a single stairwell.
“International Fire Death Rate statistics show no correlation between the allowable building height for residential buildings with a single egress stair and fatality rates. The U.S. NFPA attributes the worldwide trend in decreased fatality rates between 1979 and 2007 to improved in firefighting capacities, stringent regulation of combustible materials in construction and increased requirements for modern fire safety measures like sprinklering and automatic fire alarm systems.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09600...
Limiting number of units per floor or providing balconies that are ladder accessible.
https://www.treehugger.com/single-stair-buildings-united-sta...
To solve the parking problem, SF should require a dedicated parking spot be obtained before allowing a person to register a car with a San Francisco address. Alternatively, start charging reasonable rates for street parking, and have hugely increased rates for permits beyond a person's first.
"Free" parking has an extremely high cost on every aspect of city life.
The significant price differential for SF real estate without parking suggests this is about 3 "many" too manys.
A parking space require not only the square footage for the car, but also the lane to get to the parking space. A constructed parking space is equivalent to 1-2 bedrooms worth of living space, which is a huge difference in real estate prices.
Take a look at any aerial view of a parking lot and you'll see that only roughly half of the are is dedicated to parking spaces.
The increased density that comes from getting rid of parking means that driving is no longer essential.
https://blog.getmyparking.com/2019/07/01/why-parking-minimum...
And since they're really financial instruments, the buildings are still only half full!
While they might work as far as providing residents two routes out in an emergency, they do present challenges to firefighters [1]:
> Jack J. Murphy, a former firefighter, fire marshal, and current chairman of the New York City High-Rise Fire Safety Directors Association, has inspected some of these buildings and says they present unique challenges for firefighters. For one, the buildings’ small footprints mean very narrow scissor stairwells that can have five or more turns between floors. “What would that do to my hose stretch?” Murphy said. The compact size also means tight quarters for operation and medical staging in an emergency.
[1] https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Publications-and-medi...
But the idea of code defining form, and how we can meld safety, efficiency and beauty together - that's interesting to me.
I found this article [1] on the wiki page of 5-over-1 and find it hilarious. It's an interesting and biting critique of a number of styles that are applied to 5-over-1. I wonder if we will ever have again in this country truly beautiful housing for the masses, or if we will look back on the 2000s and 2010s US as we do now, looking at Soviet bloc apartments from the 60s and 70s.
https://www.westword.com/arts/denver-is-drowning-in-awful-ar...
L?
The reason residential buildings are constructed with a given material is usually due to the regional cost of each material. Wood is cheap and plentiful in the USA, and we've adapted it very successfully with modern building codes. But of course that cost changes with scale, as wood is not nearly as strong and light as steel, or as stiff and compressive as concrete. And our somewhat antiquated zoning laws also limit newer construction methods like post-and-beam, which results in larger, cheaper, faster to construct wood-framed homes.
If the stairway's the only way out and that's where a fire happens, then the whole thing is a deathtrap.
A number of high-fatality fires in structures over the years have involved a fire in one part of the building using an open stairway as a chimney to both fan the flames and to spread between levels. That's part of why the US stairways generally have fire doors that will "fail closed" at any fire alarm - by having the doors all closed, and (often) a ventilation system that overpressures stairwells somewhat, you have a clear space to evacuate, and, at worst, doesn't actively help the fire.
The alternative is that as a fire progresses on a lower level, the hot gasses find an open stairwell and head up, quite rapidly. The air coming in to replace this is effectively a forced draft for the fresh fire, and the hot gasses going up rapidly end up hot enough to start igniting things on other levels, in addition to making the stairwell totally unusable for evacuation. If you're unlucky, a well placed stairwell with a skylight that rapidly breaks from heat can turn a first floor fire into, quite literally, a very effective furnace with exceedingly poor containment.
This effect, unfortunately, has been demonstrated at great loss of life in various school fires and such over the years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collinwood_school_fire is one such, but there have been quite a few others over the years as well.
As much as it may be architecturally unpopular, the stairwell requirements in US buildings are one of those "written in blood" regulations that have very good historical evidence for why they exist.
The easiest way to achieve this is probably external ladders for most buildings and putting disabled occupants on the ground floor or just in bungalows or something. Sheltered housing is pretty common in the UK.
A fully covered, fancy carpeted staircase seems OTT if its' purpose is basically to be a fire escape.
I am also sure this developer would love to accept full responsibility should a fire occur in a single stair building that prevented people from evac,
I am sure this developer would not hide behind the building codes, and exclaim they are not liable because the building was "built to code" after lobbing to have the code changed, no no...
And also "pushing apartment capacity a few % points isn't really going to move the needle much on the housing crisis in many areas."
Allowing single stair buildings facilitates multi family dwellings to be built on much smaller lots - even those that currently contain single family homes.
Changing that regulation is the basis for why cities like Paris can’t maintain New York level postulation density without many buildings greater than 6 floors.
Anyway, if they built floor plans like this then I would want to see some seriously bulked up building codes to deal with fires. Also it always strikes me as odd that sprinkler systems are used to help with the fire, but smoke is what mostly kills and I rarely hear of emergency ventilation systems tied to fire alarms. If anyone knowledgeable on that sort of thing could chime in, I always love to learn why my ideas are wrong/bad.
Imagine an apartment building with curved, open staircases leading to each floor! Perhaps "Apartment Simulator 2022" will come out soon.
You definitely see them in some hotels and commercial buildings, though my understanding is despite sprinklers, they need to have autoclosing fire doors if that is the case, which are terrible to deal with every day. :s
The problem with sprinklers in California is if there is a serious earthquake, pipe breaks mean you lose fire water pressure right when you might need it most, and whole blocks can burn down.
Been awhile since that happened though so maybe the building department forgot?
Architecture and design, okay maybe, but art?
> They are not a part of the building
What does this mean?
Particularly pertinent in the Covid era when we have seen what living on top of each other leads to.
I find the current price and size of apartments to be perfectly fine.
If that's your thing, great, do it, you have your pick of geographies because nearly all of the US is empty space. But if that's not what a person wants, and instead they appreciate the things that humans can create and do for each other when there are many nearby, there are very very few locations available, the are all extremely pricy because the supply has been artificially constrained by reggulations of people who live in cities, but apparently don't want to live in cities.
It seems possible to add a second stair case to this design. You’d just mirror the first over to where the courtyard is. You’d lose the courtyard and ability to see your neighbor, but it looks like the building could still be made to jut out some past the stairs to keep light on that side.
That is quite a thing to dismiss. Is there evidence otherwise? Shouldn't we be looking at evidence that two staircases improves safety regardless of location?
The building height one is significant as the balcony is often the second means of egress, via a fire truck ladder.
https://www.treehugger.com/single-stair-buildings-united-sta...
At least in China, this will be 180° opposite of what fire code says: a minimum of 2 staircases
After all, 2 isn’t a Schelling point. So why not four staircases?
Is sidewalk a wasted space, maybe slate should write a dumb article on how people can walk between the road and curb and save space.
How about parks ? Should they be 1m x 1m square patches of grass.
There's no evidence that people who ride in cars are safer than people who ride in school buses (which have no seatbelts or airbags).
A stairway is going to take up a lot more space in a building than seatbelts and airbags are. By my estimation my apartment building would lose over 10% of its living space by doubling its amount of staircases.
However, I doubt that it would make a big difference in the cost of housing itself. It seems to me that housing is pricey because it's an investment rather than the labor cost being prohibitive.
I remember when cars had no airbags, and only lap belts on the front seats. Adding seatbelts and airbags didn't change the car size. The only difference I noticed in general was the loss or shrinking of the glove compartment (for the right airbag), and (for the left airbag) the horn button moving from the center of the steering wheel to somewhere else (usually one of the stalks).
There's efficiency, and then there's, "more people live in this city than can all fit on the sidewalks." Maybe just don't.
In one you've got units clustered around a staircase landing.
In the other you've got a long hallway and 2 staircases with units along the hallway.
So you can somehow get a zillion floors of people down 2 stairwells, but only one floor of people down one?