Archinect - News

Considerations when architecting in the WUI

2021-12-20T18:40:00-05:00

If it were me and I was rebuilding in Paradise, which I would happily do, I would be thinking about creating the simplest structure I could, so I don’t have those places of accumulation...not having these weird intersections and roof planes. You know, this is really a complicated look, which is very popular in our modern culture right now, but it’s maybe not setting us up for the best success. I’d also be adding gutter guards of a non combustible material.

Zeke Lunder sat down with Eric Knapp and Yana Valachovic (both members of the California Fire Science Consortium) to talk about their recent paper, which reviews factors that drove structure loss during the 2018 Camp Fire. They also highlight three main priorities for designing or retrofitting buildings for life in the WUI.

One Northern California designer is replenishing housing stock in the region with new, fire-resistant prefabs

2021-08-06T15:03:00-04:00

A Chico-based general contractor with a degree in architecture is attempting to use pre-fabricated, non-combustible, eco-friendly and customizable home packages to help rebuild homes in Paradise and other areas of California where replacement homes due to natural disasters still must be built.

The city of Chico was in the crosshairs of the 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed over 18,000 homes in and around Butte County over a 17-day span. This week, an entire town in Plumas County was razed by the Dixie Fire. Steelmaster has more on Vern Sneed's Q Cabin Kit here.

Related Reading: UCLA's Department of Architecture and Urban Design has been at the forefront of fire-related building resiliency since launching the FireCity and FireLAnd initiatives last year. Read our recent interview with Associate Adjunct Professor Jeffrey Inaba and Professor Hitoshi Abe here.

Poor workmanship and value engineering are the biggest risks to buildings, says UK survey

2021-07-26T12:58:00-04:00

A survey of construction industry professionals in the UK has found that uncontrolled value engineering and poor workmanship present the biggest risks to the built environment. The study was commissioned by the British Board of Agrément (BBA), a major UK body for issuing certificates for construction products.

The survey results are contained within a new report by the BBA which focuses on risks to high-rise residential buildings; which generated over 10,000 viewpoint responses between March and June 2021.

As part of the report, respondents were asked what factors they believed were “the five most likely to cause an emerging or actual disaster in the next few years.” 79% of respondents ranked “poor construction / installation quality” in their top five risks for building safety, while 74% identified “uncontrolled value engineering.” Aspects relating to fire safety ranked a distant third and fourth, with “breaches in fire compartmentation” included by 53% of respondents, and fires fr...

High rise fire in LA could prompt city to close a fire sprinkler loophole

2020-01-30T13:27:00-05:00

Officials in Los Angeles are reconsidering closing a legal loophole that exempts tall buildings built between 1943 and 1974 from fire sprinkler requirements after an unsprinkled high rise apartment tower on the city's Westside caught fire yesterday for the second time in recent years, injuring a a 13 of people, including a three month old baby and one man who is listed as being in serious condition.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the fire took place in a 25-story tower located in the Barrington Plaza complex, which is made up of three similar towers of differing heights surrounding a landscaped superblock site. The fire engulfed the sixth and seventh floors of the tallest tower and caused smoke damage to several floors in the development. According to The Los Angeles Times tenants in the building report a variety of maintenance issues in the complex, including a constantly broken elevator. A fire took place in the same building back in 2013 that apparently led to few safety or ...

A battle over Eucalyptus—and over what constitutes an invasive species—erupts in California

2019-12-16T13:47:00-05:00

Fragile and flammable, Eucalypti have been implicated in worsening wildfires across the world. But there's little consensus over their culpability, value, or future in California's landscape. Defenders and opponents each say that science and history are on their side.

A long-simmering battle over the current and future status of California's Eucalyptus trees is close to bubbling over again, as the increasingly present risk of catastrophic fire events pits Eucalyptus lovers against native plant enthusiasts who would like to see the tinder-producing groves replaced with native plant species.

Susie Cagle has created an insightful illustrated article for The Guardian that highlights the competing arguments for and against Eucalyptus preservation.

Grenfell Report Blames Firefighters

2019-11-01T19:48:00-04:00

The London fire brigade’s readiness for the Grenfell Tower fire was “gravely inadequate” and fewer people would have died if it had been better prepared, a long-awaited public inquiry report into the disaster that killed 72 people has concluded ... [despite] “compelling evidence that the external walls of the building failed to comply with requirements” of building regulations governing fire safety.

The Fire Brigades Union published a damning report in September that accuses former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's deregulation — followed, and reportedly amplified, by Tony Blair — of having gutted building and fire safety regulations. At the same time, firefighters are blamed for a "lack of preparation" that cost 72 lives.

Meanwhile, families of the victims are suing the manufacturers of the buildings cladding and insulation.

New Bartlett focus views “safety as a fundamental starting point, not as a late fix”

2019-10-29T12:01:00-04:00

A new specialization in fire safety design is being launched by the University College London (UCL) and The Bartlett in the wake of the disasterous Grenfell tower fire that took place in 2017.

Bartlett director Bob Sheil told The Architect’s Journal, “What we are really proposing here is a paradigm shift and [to] think about safety in the early stages of design propositions as a positive contributor to good design.”

The course, to be offered to both part- and full-time students, is set to explore the design of fire escape routes, fire separation packages, and fire suppression systems with a keen focus on tricky fire design-challenged typologies like tall residential structures and large assembly spaces.

Sheil added, “One of the things we have come to realise is there is a huge amount of research and development and education that can go into understanding building design through safety as a fundamental starting point, not as a late fix.”

Fire safety engineering and design special...

How Notre Dame was almost totally lost

2019-07-17T15:20:00-04:00

Some of what went wrong that night has been reported in the French news media, including Le Monde and Le Canard Enchaîné. Now, The New York Times conducted scores of interviews and reviewed hundreds of documents to reconstruct the missteps—and the battle that saved Notre-Dame in the first four critical hours after the blaze began. What became clear is just how close the cathedral came to collapsing.

A stunning visual report from The New York Times lays out a chain of events chronicling the heart-wrenching battle to save Notre-Dame cathedral as it burned uncontrollably on April 15, 2019.

The article points to several key lapses in the design of the cathedral's fire safety systems that ultimately allowed the fire to rage unimpeded for nearly an hour before fire fighting efforts got underway.

The report, for example, highlights the convoluted design of Notre-Dame's high-tech fire warning system as contributing to the delay.

Glenn Corbett, associate professor of fire science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, told The New York Times, “You have a system that is known for its ability to detect very small quantities of smoke. Yet the whole outcome of it is this clumsy human response." Corbett added, "You can spend a lot to detect a fire, but it all goes down the drain when you don’t move on it.”

In addition, the report notes that the church's roof timbers—400-year...

Building codes prove effective in limiting damage from wildfires in California

2019-04-12T16:08:00-04:00

As the state of California begins preparing for another wildfire season, November's Camp Fire—the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history to date—offers up some important lessons.

A new analysis released by McClatchy looked at property records in order to make sense of the fire's seemingly random paths of destruction. The results found that the year a house was built was a large determiner of whether or not it was likely to burn down.

In 2008, the state updated its fire codes, mandating that newly built housing in wildland-urban interface zones meet strict building codes designed to prevent them from catching on fire. The new codes require homes be built with, among other things, interior sprinklers, fire resistant roofs and sidings, decks and patios made of non-flammable materials, and heat-resistant windows.

Homes built after these codes went into effect have stood a much better chance of going undamaged. According the the McClatchy analysis, 51 percent of...

How many fires does it take to get to the center of a solution?

2018-11-28T14:53:00-05:00

Nearly 16,000 structures have been destroyed in the Camp Fire, the deadliest and most destructive fire in the history of California. (The next nine worst blazes in the state together destroyed 20,500 structures.) The devastation is in part a story of how climate change–induced “boom and bust” cycles of rainfall and drought have made firetraps of California forests. But it’s also a story about the way we build.

In lieu of recent events, California has been hit with a wave of wildfires. Affected in both the Southern and Northern areas of California, the recent months have left many Californians with nothing. Areas have been reduced to ash, leaving homeowners to evacuate the area. The blame can be pointed to several contributing factors. However, what solutions can be made in order to prevent these destructive fires from engulfing these areas?

Wildfires are nothing new to California, yet, with more and more Westerners wanting to live in or near nature, the number of homes located in the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, has increased from 3.3 million to 4.4 million. Homeowners wanting to live in nature is nothing uncommon. States like Colorado or North Carolina have homeowners that share this similar desire. However, the West is filled with wildlands, and wildlands do burn. Historically, wildfires in the West are tied with the mismanagement of forests and land. Along with strict WUI buildin...

New findings state Grenfell Tower insulation never passed fire safety test

2018-05-23T14:58:00-04:00

The insulation that burned out of control on Grenfell Tower had never passed the required safety test and should never have been on the building, a BBC investigation has discovered. Panorama understands the manufacturer, Celotex, used extra fire retardant in the product that qualified for the safety certificate. A more flammable version was then sold for public use, the programme believes. Celotex said it is co-operating with the police investigation and inquiry.

Last June the Grenfell Tower fire in London killed 72 people prompting ongoing investigations. It has been found that the RS5000 insulation used in the building's refurbishment gives off toxic fumes containing cyanide when burned. Almost all who perished in the fire were killed by smoke.

The manufacturer Celotex has been accused of misleading marketing, selling their insulation as compatible with other cladding panels and tower block refurbishment—both of which are false. Safety was neglected as the cladding panels and insulation in Grenfell Tower were never tested together. This could result in corporate manslaughter for Celotex.

The same toxic insulation is found to have been used on hundreds of other buildings across England.