Fire Safety of Historical Buildings: Principles and Methodological Approach

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses an issue rarely contemplated in the management of historical buildings, fire safety. There is an implication that “compliant” means “safe” and that the goals and objectives of compliance are perfectly aligned with those of fire safety. In the case of historical buildings, this is a mistake that has resulted in the loss of major historical buildings through the centuries. This paper presents a framework of analysis that uses adequate tools to evaluate and establish true performance assessment. The objective is to adequately define and implement the goal of fire safety. This paper is not a traditional research paper in that it does not describe experiments, computations or analysis. Instead, this paper proposes, through an example of application, a critical overview of problems incurred when evaluating fire safety on the basis of solutions issued from prescriptive approaches. In the process, this paper highlights the value of a comprehensive performance-based approach. A performance-based analysis emphasizes an approach to design that values the inherent features of historic buildings. This could potentially result in minimum and rational alterations that meet the goals of fire safety while also achieving other restoration objectives.

KEYWORDS:

• Fire dynamics
• fire protection
• fire safety
• life safety
• regulatory compliance

Acknowledgments

This work was conducted while on sabbatical at Ecole Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne funded by the Landolt & Cia Chair in Innovation for a Sustainable Future. The support of Dr. Michael Woodrow (Foster + Partners) in the analysis of the building is much appreciated. The collaboration of the conservation authorities of the Ville de Genève is also acknowledged. This analysis is not intended to question or to conduct a rigorous fire safety engineering analysis of the buildings discussed but to use them as an example to illustrate a methodological approach.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.