Evaluation of Key Fire Safety Criteria Required to Inform Architectural Decision-Making at Briefing and Scheme Design Stages

摘要

Traditional fire protection is based on prescriptive criteria specified in fire, or building, codes. The key limitation of this approach to promoting safe building design is that it cannot accommodate innovation in either the use of materials, spatial organization or fire protection systems. The preparation of the fire engineering evalaution of a building and the protection systems design normally takes place at an advanced stage in the design process. With certain forms of development contract and regulatory approval process the fire engineering design may not start until the construction is well advanced. However the key architectural and services design decisions which have a significant impact on the fire protection strategy, the cost of management of installed systems (static and dynamic) and on regulatory approval are taken at the scheme design and preliminary detailing stages and are both difficult and expensive to subsequently reverse or compensate for.