Increasing Building Fire Safety by Bridging the Gap between Architects and Fire Safety Engineers

摘要

Fire safety engineers are often viewed as driving the level of fire safety of buildings as they design and review the fire safety and egress systems. However, the design and review missions are generally conducted based on a given building design, including spatial layout, material use and site plan, which are mostly determined by architects. Therefore, architects have a significant influence on the fire safety design of buildings, even if fire safety engineers are seen as having final responsibility. As such, a building design that takes fire safety into account at early stages of architect involvement becomes more ideal, and can yield better a performing building in a possible fire incident. However, little research has been conducted into what aspects of fire safety of buildings architects should consider in the building design process, and on how effective fire safety engineers are at delivering fire safety guidance to architects to improve the building fire safety performance. A better understanding of these is beneficial to increase the actual fire performance of buildings. This research aims to develop a method to increase building fire safety performance by decreasing the gap between architects and fire safety engineers in the context of building, people and fire, well-known key components in building fire safety. To gain insight into the actual fire performance of buildings, and the interaction of building, people and fire with respect to building design and fire safety systems employed, fire incidents which resulted in a large number of casualties are analyzed. One of the fire incidents is exemplified to illustrate how the proposed method can address shortcomings in building design that were identified.