FOCUS
Lifecycle safety
to see long span construction with fewer columns, coupled with downstand cellular beam construction to incorporate services through floor beams, rather than below – as was the norm some years ago. This construction style brings several
advantages, including more ‘lettable’ floor area; futureproofed spaces; lines of uninterrupted view; faster construction; and reduced floor zone depths, allowing for lower building height and reduced cost or more available floors as a result. Yet alongside these benefits, there are also challenges – communication between the various parties in the supply chain involved being a key example. From the designer, specifier and suppliers through to installers and building control officers, the detail can be lost, misunderstood or not addressed at all.
Supply chain guidance
We would like to see more formal, prescriptive guidance for the supply chain, which ensures collaboration between the various professionals at the relevant stages in the process. This may be incorporated within Approved Document B to the Building Regulations (ADB), or be issued separately. One particular issue in the protection of
steel structures is to assume the steel design output and subsequent ‘redundant’ load bearing strength, and therefore the level of coating protection required. To underestimate this for any reason is a high risk approach that
40 JUNE 2019
www.frmjournal.com
should be questioned vigorously. Only ‘actual’ design output should be used and supplied by the project design team. To assume a value to gain a competitive advantage or solve a challenge is not engineering: it is potentially risking life and property safety. In order to address these issues, we created
a roundtable to debate the issue of fire safety in these supply chains, which included representatives from London Fire Brigade, the Association of Specialist Fire Protection (ASFP), the Fire Protection Association, the Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE) and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).
Performance criteria
Out of this roundtable, the Steel Structures group was formed to examine fire safety processes from design to build, involving local authority building control, the IFE, the ASFP, RIBA and ourselves. All agreed that something needed to be done to streamline the supply chains and create a process in which each responsible part of the chain was committed to reaching the standards set originally, which enabled the use of products and materials to the specification originally agreed. Since then, RIBA has taken this forward and has created seven work stages for fire management which cover fire risk, fire design strategy, fire design, the contractor fire safety plan, specialist fire input and fire management. As architects progress through
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