July 11th 2024

SES: Urbanarium Decoding Density

As part of the single stair discussion, the Urbanarium Decoding Density competition has now wrapped up. There are many, many great ideas not only that make use of single exit stairs, but for improved density and usability as well!

The 1st place award was shared by Studio Oh Song from New York and Switch from Vancouver. Congratulations!

The 3rd place award went to PAC Lab from Auckland, with a traditional two stair design that could be used with today's code rules. Amazing!

There were eight honourable and special mentions, many of which were from local to Vancouver teams.

With over 500 pages of ideas from all the teams that entered, it is a huge collection of ideas on how to help solve our suburban density challenges!

urbanarium.org  

SES: Code Shift

When North America’s building codes were first drafted in the late 1800s and early 1900s (the first National Building Code of Canada was published in 1941) in response to conflagrations that had occurred in many of our major Cities, strict measures to prevent the spread of fire were included to prevent these major catastrophes. As much as we may grumble occasionally about the code and the process, the result has been that we haven't experienced a major conflagration since, which has been a major positive benefit for our society.

Now that we are 100+ years on, some of the strict measures are being challenged, as is discussed in this editorial article from Canadian Architect and a code change request to increase the allowable height of single exit stair buildings from 2 storeys to 6 storeys in the 2025 National Building Code of Canada. This makes sense to me as fire resistive materials, construction practices, and fire engineering in other parts of the world, have greatly advanced our understanding of the actual fire risks and the means to provide a fire safe environment in our building while improving economics.

canadianarchitect.com  

SES: BC Single Exit Stairways

Ravi Kahlon, BC's Housing Minster, has stated in an interview with the National Observer that, "We are going to allow them. We're moving forward. We're going ahead," followed by, "What we have to finalize is the specifics of the code. What are the parameters within the code that we need? That work is going to happen all through summer, and we'll make public the new code this fall."

The change to allow residential builds up to 6 storeys with a single exit stair will probably be one of the most significant changes to the British Columbia Building Code since the inception of the National Building Code in 1941. Once again BC leads innovation in the building regulation in Canada. This is on the the heels of recent achievements of 6 storey wood frame construction, 18 storey encapsulated mass-timber, and energy code implementation.

The full report provided by my colleague Bob Heikkila, P.Eng., C.P., FEC, over at Jensen Hughes (formerly CFT Engineering) can be found here on the Innovation page for BC Codes.

We eagerly await the BC Public Review of the proposed code changes for this.

gov.bc.ca