This online journal has reached its 101st post – or more accurately, its 151st.
I wrote for the print edition of Urban Realm’s predecessor, Prospect, for a few years then began contributing to The Lighthouse’s website ten years ago, in December 2006. The last piece I uploaded there was dated August 2009, more or less when The Lighthouse was extinguished. As it happens, that was the 50th article I’d written for them.
I picked up the online journal again, for Urban Realm, in February 2010 and it’s taken six years to reach 101 posts here. Taking into account what I wrote for The Lighthouse, that’s 151 posts in more or less ten years. Not that anyone’s counting…
Each piece takes a few hours to write, although those hours can be spread over several months. The object has always been to share inspirations – buildings, places, images, writing, people, things – and speak critically but positively about them. After all, there’s already plenty of banal architecture out there, along with crap music, unpalatable food and unflattering clothes – and they don’t need any more coverage than they already get.
Nonetheless someone occasionally takes umbrage, and they ask self-righteously what qualifies you to criticise – or even to form an opinion on the subject. That happened when Urban Realm visited Nairn five years ago and an anonymous voice wondered why we had the temerity to voice an opinion on a town we didn’t live in.
As the German playwright Gotthold Lessing once said: “You do not have to be an egg-laying hen to know when an egg is foul!” Except that in this case, we were nothing but positive about Nairn, although the town had been put forward for the Carbuncles by a disgruntled resident with an ulterior motive. To extend Gotthold Lessing’s analogy, just because you haven’t designed a theatre, it doesn’t mean that you can’t form an opinion about theatres in general.
So much for the separation of criticism and authorship.
Being “critical” isn’t synonymous with being “negative”, but some believe that criticism consists solely of making negative judgments about things we don’t like. Often they back up their argument with what passes for common knowledge, but starting a sentence with “everyone knows”, “many believe…” or even “some people think…” could be regarded as an ad populum argument – a cheap and lazy way to score points.
If you save the populist soundbites for “short form” journalism, then cultural journalism – the kind that architecture magazines usually print – tends to be “long form”, in order that it can explore the issues in detail. That’s what this piece tries to do, too.
The real test of anything we build is not aesthetic, practical nor even economic – but what happens in an emergency. In extremis, after a serious fire or explosion, the structure must hold together long enough to allow people to escape. However, whether they get out safely is down to human nature as much as building design … vehicle design … or indeed aircraft design.
In order to “type certify” a new airliner, trial evacuations are carried out - the photo above shows a Boeing 747 "Jumbo Jet" as it was about to go into service in 1970. The testing of the Airbus A380 – the "SuperJumbo" – was the most recent, during which an airframe parked inside a hangar at Hamburg was fully loaded with people. In this case, 853 passengers plus cabin crew. When the command to evacuate was given, the aircraft was emptied in an astonishingly fast 78 seconds. For the purposes of the test, a regular Lufthansa crew was in charge; some smoke and loose objects had been introduced into the cabin; it was dark (although the emergency lights were working); and some exits had been blocked off.
The speed of the passengers’ egress wasn’t down to Teutonic efficiency alone, though – the guinea pigs were well briefed beforehand, and had time to consider the best way to escape. Tellingly, they co-operated with each other because they knew they weren’t in mortal danger. Most people treat all alarms as false alarms, until proven otherwise – just watch any building site once it’s near to completion. Each time Kidde, Minerva or ADT set off the alarms, workmen come sidling out long after the sirens first began to sound.
Yet once people believe they really are in peril, the alarm instills panic into their behaviour. Sounding the tocsin goes back to prehistory, when the great war horns sounded a warning. In medieval times, the pealing of the cathedral’s bells warned the city: Fear Fire Foes. That led to the banshee screaming of the air raid siren during modern wars, then the klaxons alerting RAF crews to scramble in the ‘60’s when the Three Minute Warning sounded. Very early in our lives, a connection is made between alarms and danger: self-preservation is a deep instinct and ultimately it over-rides everything else.
The difference between our responses to a practice run, and the real thing, are almost impossible to replicate. That’s where evacuation tests on aircraft and the fire drills we all experienced at school fall down. They can’t represent the terror of a real emergency because the mind isn’t adept at self-deception. It operates in a unified way, so if the higher rationalising part knows this is just a drill, then the primitive, instinctual response will be subdued.
Words are inadequate to describe what happens when you do have to flee a building. Instinct kicks in and the brain suspends any functions which aren’t critical to escaping. Adrenaline takes over. The advice about walking calmly towards an exit means nothing when danger is close at hand. You move as fast as you physically can, and afterwards you can’t recall any detail of that 30 seconds, which subjectively felt like a lifetime. The routines hard-wired into us succeeded – we survived to tell the tale. Yet sometimes things turn out differently.
After the 1985 accident at Manchester when a British Airtours Boeing 737 suffered an engine fire on take-off and 55 people died in the resulting crash, Cranfield University made a detailed study of aircraft evacuation. Critically, it took five-and-a-half minutes for the last passenger to emerge from the burning 737 at Manchester Ringway; the aim of the research was to find out why. The researchers used a retired Hawker Siddeley Trident and some cash-strapped volunteers. Uniquely, most of the participants were students who were paid £10 to turn up with the promise of another fiver each time they succeeded in being among the first few to escape from the plane.
The cash was handed over as soon as they reached terra firma, and the professor conducting the experiment judged that the mixture of the students’ natural competitiveness and the promise of hard cash would prove “as compelling an incentive to escape as life itself”. You can imagine the reaction when the stewards called on the passengers to evacuate – “The desperation to escape quickly was quite alarming as volunteers battled to be the first through the exits,” wrote Max Kingsley-Jones in the magazine Flight International. People were carried along in a throng, crushed under seats, wedged in the aisles and caught against bulkheads.
While the Airbus trial achieved a rapid evacuation thanks to the passengers co-operating with each other and escaping in an orderly manner, women and children first, the Trident trial was a closer reflection of reality. Although it was carried out in the late 1980’s and has never been repeated, the trial was closely examined by the Civil Aviation Authority. The fact that the Germans carried out the A380 trial as they did suggests that they weren’t paying attention: they didn’t come across panic, or the other extreme, abject resignation to your fate.
Sometimes people just give up and huddle in a corner to await their fate. It’s well known in mountain rescue attempts that climbers suffering from hypothermia gradually cease to fight as their core temperature drops. Eventually they just give up, psychologically. Both panic and resignation are illustrated by Dad’s Army, that popular TV re-enactment of World War 2: when trouble came along, Fraser resignedly exclaimed, “We’re aa doo–oomed!”, whereas Jones cried out, “Don’t panic! Don’t panic!” We are two sides of that same coin.
One way around panic and resignation is methodical training. Although occasional fire drills don’t prepare us to face disaster, over-familiarity with crisis situations does seem to work for firefighters and airline pilots. A large proportion of a pilot’s training is devoted to preparing for emergencies, in order to make his responses as automatic as possible. Several hours are spent on the simulator every month, practicing stall recovery, flame-outs and forced landings: the intention is that the pilot “over-learns” the skills needed, because the shock when it actually happens may diminish his ability.
Over-learned responses and realistic situations give the pilot confidence to stay calm: but however realistic the simulator, that shock factor is still missing. Psychologists have understood for decades that the brain doesn’t function well when overloaded with stimuli, and the tragic illustration of this is a passenger trapped in the blazing wreckage of an aircraft who continues to struggle with an unyielding emergency exit, yet ignores the gaping hole in the fuselage close by. The brain fixates on one thing to the exclusion of all else.
More recently, both aeronautical and architectural fire engineers have begun to use software modelling to replicate evacuations. For a project I ran a few years ago, a computer model representing 12,000 sq.m. of floorplate and 1150 people was created by SAFE Fire Engineering in Glasgow. The evacuation sequence looks like an L.S. Lowry painting brought to life: but the matchstick people behave differently each time, as computer algorithms try to take account of the randomness of human behaviour – panic, confusion, our reactions to other peoples’ irrationality and the heat, smoke and toxic gases. The software’s ability to run evacuation scenarios over and over again generates an “envelope” of performance, rather than a single datum, hence a truer representation of reality.
Software has the advantage over full-scale aircraft certification trials that the latter cost £1million a time and volunteers are sometimes accidentally injured, or worse. However, it does rely on the programme's code being suitably nuanced that it can predict how fickle humans will react, and that’s the real skill. Fire engineering is a specialist field, and only a small proportion of buildings benefit from it. For the rest, architects rely on the prescriptions of the Technical Standards to guide them on how the building should assist people to escape from a fire.
Are we, or the people who write the Standards, any closer to understanding why people react the way they do? That peculiar mixture of crowd psychology, brain chemistry and self-preservation: how will that turn out, when the VESDA sensors sniff out smoke, then the sounders are activated, zone by zone, and the alarms grow louder and louder? The corridor smoke doors swing shut, the power goes off and the emergency lights glow on. It’s not a drill this time. It’s for real.
How will you react…?
