99% Invisible - 122- Good Egress

Episode Date: July 9, 2014

When designing a commercial structure, there is one safety component that must be designed right into the building from the start: egress. “Egress” refers to an entire exit system from a building: stairs, corridors, and evacuation routes outside the building. Each state’s building … Continue reading →

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. When designing a commercial structure, the architect must make the hallways wide enough for a wheelchair. The materials must be compatible with its surrounding climate, the beams must be able to support the building and withstand the wind. The building should be dynamic, interesting, comfortable, and ready to be completely abandoned if it burns.

There are a number of considerations for how a building should respond to emergency. Horns versus strobes versus speakers. The pulsating frequency of the light, the intensity of the light, smoke dampening, it goes on and on. There's the sprinklers, the panic bars, you light, the intensity of the light, smoke dampening, it goes on and on. There's the sprinklers, the panic bars, you know, the spring loaded horizontal bar that you push to unlock emergency exit, the smoke detectors, what kinds you use and the distances between them.

You know, a lot of people hardly even look up and see these things and they just need to be there when an emergency happens. Now, Adam Wining and Daniel Scoville are architects. We work with them at Arxon in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. Most of the time, when they're working on fire safety, they'll consult experts about where to place what kinds of architectural emergency devices. But there's one safety device that they must design right into the building from the get-go.

It's impossible to ignore. As far as jail locations, that's pretty important right from the start because it changes the whole dynamic of your space. Typically, buildings require two fire stairs, but it all depends on the size and purpose of the structure. In architecture and building codes, you always need a certain number of exits or means of egress so it weighs out of a building.

And this fire escape precariously bolted to the side of the building is one of our means of egress out of the space. And this is how 99% of visible is going to escape a burning building. This is how Arxine and 99% of visible are going to escape our burning building. In case of fire, Architects Daniel Skolville and Adam Wynneck and producer Avery Trouffleman would put their steely resolve and athletic prowess to the test. There's this classic rot iron fire escape right outside of our window.

And I thought it was defunct. It's all rusty and stuff. But then I bothered to read the sign with the evacuation plan for our building. Always read the evacuation plan. Fire escapes are not allowed in new construction. But because we are in a beautiful old brick building, the Firescape is actually one of our means of egress. We just speak of means of egress, thinking of the whole root, the corridor, and the stairs, and you think of an exit as being essentially the door. Professor Sarah Wormiel, Independent Scholar and Researcher at MIT.

One of my books is called The Fireproof Building. I can't remember this subtitle. It's The Fireproof Building, Technology and Public Safety in the 19th century American City. The single most dangerous thing for architecture, historically, is fire. And in the 1700s, if a fire did break out, there wasn't a whole lot you could do about it. By that time there were firefighters.

Whom you summoned by Yelline Loudly. And they would come, and they would bring you the fire escape. It was a cart with a ladder on it. That was actually what the earliest fire escapes were. So fire escape methods started to get incorporated into architecture, starting with the scuttle. It looked like a skylight. It would have some kind of cover. It was like a trap door on the roof, and then there'd be a ladder to get up and out. And so, in a fire, you would climb through the scuttle out onto the roof,

hop to your neighbor's scuttle and crawl into their building, which presumably hadn't also caught fire. That was the beginning, this idea that a city could require something for the sake of fire safety. Around 1860, New York begins to require means of egress in tenement buildings. Tenement buildings were tall, flammable, densely packed tinder boxes just full of families. So of course landlords went with the least expensive options. The popular cheap fix was rope. Ropes with baskets that you're supposed to somehow, you know,

the buildings on fire, you have your kid, you're terrified and you calmly open this little nightstand. Pull out the basket with ropes, you know, set up the apparatus, strap yourself in, and somehow, you know, lower yourself calmly to the ground. You know, it's just preposterous. There are these hilarious old advertisements for fake cabinets and hollow refrigerators and empty washing machines

so that you can store your ropes and basket apparatus. Because no one would notice that extra washing machine. One engineer actually thought that instead of dispatching ropes from inside, archers could shoot the ropes up to the higher floors. You know, people aren't that athletic necessarily to begin with, but second of all, it's a fire. You know, this isn't the best time to, you know, like figure out how to lower yourself

on a rope. Another patent proposed individual parachute hats with accompanying rubber shoes to break the fall. There are also these big slide fire escapes that were largely marketed to schools as both emergency devices and playground equipment. There actually used to be a giant spiral slide to escape the Claremont Hotel right here in Oakland, which would have made that place a whole lot better. There were lots of ideas, but by the 1870s, firescapes began becoming something iron, something fixed to the building.

Although by that point, they still weren't anything great. They were like an iron platform outside of a window with straight ladders attached, or it might just be a straight ladder clamp to the wall. In some cities, the external ladders angled and widened to become more like stairs. This was an improvement, of course, but ultimately, fire escapes just didn't suffice. And it took a terrible tragedy to show this. So the ash building in New York

was built as a loft building, and its owners represented it as being, you know, maybe for warehousing, not necessarily for manufacturing. Based on its dimensions, the ash building was required to have three means of egress, but the developer insisted that the property would just be used as warehousing. So rather than three stairs, he was allowed to put in two stairs and a thin fire escape. Then the owner rents the top three floors of the ash building to the Triangle Shirt Waste Company. In March of 1911, there's a fire in the buildings, it's not knowing exactly how it

begins and it spreads quickly. The 10th floor has an exit to the roof. So many of the 10th floor workers are able to survive by taking the stairs up, and the workers on the 8th floor are by and large, able to get out. But workers on the 9th floor were trapped. The doors of the stairs opened inward

and became blocked with bodies. And the stairs were backed up with workers exiting from the floors below. So workers on the ninth floor couldn't even get down. Only a few workers on this floor knew about the 10th floor exit. And so they didn't even try to go upstairs. There was a charge that one of the doors was locked. And this wasn't proved to the trial, but I believe even if it had been, with all the people

exiting from the eighth floor and the staircases were very narrow and winding, there just wasn't the capacity. Some workers tried to use the outside fire escape, and it collapsed under the weight. It was from the windows of the ninth floor that many workers desperate to escape the flames and smoke fell or jumped to their deaths. 146 people lost their lives right in the middle of Grinch Village. There were a lot of witnesses. It was horrible.

But the building was fine. The ash building was a fireproof building. And of course, it's still standing. And it's now part of New York University. The ash building, now called the Brown Building, was well-made, which is why at the time no one really thought it needed egress. Exits in egress were a problem people thought for the tenements and the poor quality buildings.

The logic was, if a building was first class, it was in and of itself safe for the occupants. And then the people could just be safely locked inside of these non-combustible buildings. The triangle fire proved that architecture couldn't protect us. We had to protect ourselves from architecture. This is when an organization called the National Fire Protection Association does a lot of studies in thinking about egress. And good egress meant getting rid of fire escapes for so many reasons. They weren't commonly used, so they were often out of order in states of disrepair. In northern

climates, they were covered with snow, were eroded by rain, and not everyone could access them, like people with disabilities, and the very young, and the elderly, and women who were hamstrung by the fashion of the time. Women in these long skirts might not have the presence of wine to take off their skirt so they could actually get out. Also fire escapes are scary. You see some narrow, rickety staircases on really tall buildings that make you feel like you should strap on rubber shoes and a parachute hat. And if people weren't used to using fire escapes, they often didn't know where they were. People try to leave the way they came in, you know, that's what they think of.

And that's where modern fire escapes come in. They're not bolted to the side of the building. They are the logical place where you would go in an emergency. They are the stairs. Well they look like normal stairs, but really they're pieces of emergency equipment enclosed in fireproof walls and sealed with a self-closing door and covered with sprinklers and alarms. And because they work perfectly well as stairways, they're often the stairway in a building. So the building won't have the grand stairway any longer. It'll have lots of elevators and the fire stairs.

Good by opulent lobbies with sweeping grand stairways. If you like to take the stairs, you've probably already bemoaned the fact that they are always shoved off into a tower and are very cold and industrial, no matter what the building looks like from the outside. If we want, we can make them look good, but most clients elect to spend their money on things that people are going to see more. Office made in architect Adam Wineck again.

The stairways need to be what's called rated, meaning that they need to be enclosed in a type of construction that won't melt or allow the fire to penetrate as quickly as a non-rated wall. These rated towers can be like buildings within buildings. The prime example of a souped-up fire stairway is in Freedom Tower. The Freedom Tower, which has this emergency core, which is on its own separate electrical and plumbing system, and has its own elevator, its own stairs. That's Elijah Huge. He's a professor at Wesleyan University. And I'm also a practicing architect, and I run a small firm called Periphery Projects, and part of that Periphery involves doing research on architecture and emergency.

He's particularly fascinated by these core structures around the fire's dairs. And these emergency cores are modeled with software and simulations dedicated solely to egress. This program Exodus 4.0 I think there's now Exodus 5.0 can simulate how quickly a floor of a building can be cleared based on the maximum number of bodies that would be allowed in this space, how quickly could those bodies exit this space. So the architect or actually more likely the consultant will plug in the measurements of a building, all the information about its emergency equipment, the maximum number of occupants, and basically click play

and watch the digital people escape the pixel flames. A lot of agent-based modeling programs with humans don't work terribly well because humans don't necessarily behave predictably, but in emergencies they do. Given adequate signage, people will behave in predictable ways in the event of an emergency. So this makes sense. We've already established that in an emergency, people don't want to go places they haven't gone to before, or use devices they've never seen, or figure out if they can catch a rope,

shot at them with a bow and arrow. The way Egress works now is in keeping with the way that we use buildings normally. Even though rated towers take up a lot of space and money and make for an unpleasant stepping experience, it's hard to argue with this solution. It's paid off, let's say. Sarah Wormiel again. For 2012, in non-residential structures, there were 65 deaths in the whole year. You know, probably more people were struck by lightning.

Actually, 28 people were struck by lightning in 2012, but still, even though each one is a tragedy, 65 deaths doesn't strike me as all that many. This number is already down from 2003, where there were 220 deaths in non-residential buildings, so these are the buildings with heavy regulations and core structures. Modern emergency equipment and egress procedures are really helping to minimize the effects of fire accidents. But from an aesthetic standpoint, it's almost a pity, because fire escapes are beautiful. And although I'm not really thrilled at the prospect of clamoring down the fire escape outside my window, I do like to look at it. And for Sarah Wormill, fire escapes, even the ones that are no longer in use, are this physical

reminder that we evolve past being a culture that says, here's a rope, good luck buddy. I just like seeing them and hope that they'll be preserved because it just makes me realize how we kind of have to work together as a society. You have to rely on other people to put in the stairs to follow the rules for the rules to be there, and that's what makes us safe. I am somewhere in the city, I am climbing up a fire escape. I am somewhere in the city, I am climbing up a fire escape. I have got to save my baby from a mess this world has made."

99% Invisible was produced this week by Avery Trouffleman, with Sam Greenspan, Katie Mingle, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 local public radio KALW in San Francisco and produced of the offices of ArcSign in beautiful, downtown Oakland, California. If you like the stories on this program, you can get more and more and more stories and correspond with all the people who make this show on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. But there are more fire escapes and you can shake a stick at 99pi.org. From PRX.