Haejun Park - Current Research

A holistic perspective of building fire safety

The field of fire safety is highly regulation-driven.

This is partly because

- voluntary actions of building owners for the installation of costly fire safety measures are hardly expected, and
- the level of fire safety may vary depending on the characteristics of the building.

So regulations are enforced, and all buildings and relevant stakeholders are to abide by the regulations.

Regulations in building fire safety can be largely divided into two: prescriptive-based and performance-based. Prescriptive-based approach specifies detailed requirements and fire protection engineers and architects can be free from legal and technical responsibilities as long as the fire protection measures and building design comply with the prescriptive code requirements. No hassle!! However, there has been criticism of the prescriptive building regulations that they often lack reasonable rationales for the requirements, do not account for the variability of individual building characteristics, and do not easily support any innovative building designs and technologies. In response, a performance-based approach was introduced in the 1970s, allowing more engineering-oriented fire safety measures.

The biggest difference between the two different approaches may be the consideration of the "actual fire safety performance." In the prescriptive-based approach, the code itself is considered to be designed to meet societal fire safety expectations such that code compliance can be interpreted automatically as the achievement of expected performance. Considering much more diverse building uses than the specified occupancy in the building code, it is manifest that cook-book type code requirements can not achieve the proper level of performance for a variety of numerous buildings. In the performance-based approach, however, the actual fire safety performance is taken into account for any individual building, which makes more sense than the prescriptive-based approach.

Then, in the performance-based approach, it is critically important to evaluate the actual building fire safety performance correctly to determine whether the fire safety designs meet the intended performance. However, the current fire protection engineering education and practices do not account for the effects of building design features on the actual fire safety performance. The figure above explains;

- Architects and fire protection engineers have different perspectives on the key three components of fire safety: building, fire, and people, and conduct their mission for building design and fire safety design, respectively.
- The area, A, indicates the building design features that are determined only by architects, without being influenced by fire safety regulations. A typical example would be architectural designs for aesthetics.

The intersection area B indicates the features of building design or fire safety design that influence the other. It is regulated by building codes, and typically, includes passive fire protection features such as compartmentalization and means of egress. For example, floor plan (building design) influences and is influenced by the locations of exit doors, the number of exits, corridor width, etc. (fire safety design)
Area C indicates approaches that are mostly determined by fire protection engineers.

From this diagram, the identified problems are as follows.

Although area B is critically involved with fire safety performance, it is often finished by architects with architects' viewpoints without proper input from fire protection engineers.
- - Architects reflect area B to building design following prescriptive code requirements and fire protection engineers check the code compliance but there has not been proper communication between them about the effects of the elements of area B on the actual fire performance and building design.

- The elements of area A are often related to the artistic expression of architects which is not subject to regulations for fire safety, and fire protection engineers have not taken into account the effects of them on the building fire safety performance. They, however, influence the actual fire safety performance.

Based on this understanding, a simple, generic, quick, and easy building fire safety performance assessment tool is developed. Please refer to my publications for more details. A simple spreadsheet is also available to calculate building fire safety performance which can be found here.

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