Project Memo - Erika

Our experience with many buildings, once we enter them, is as a user. We have no control over how well built or safe a skyscraper or an apartment building will be. Until September 11, 2001, it can be surmised that few people considered safety in high rises important.

The attacks on the World Trade Center highlighted how important design is to the safety of building occupants in the case of an emergency. In an interview with Rick Bell, president of the New York chapter of the Architecture Institute of America, I discovered that architecture firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, LLC was the only firm in the New York metropolitan area to lose an architect in the attacks. When SOM won the competition to rebuild on the site at 7 World Trade center, they were motivated to innovate “contemporary building enhancements that [create] a new model for life safety and sustainable design.” But, to further the importance of life safety in high-rise buildings, SOM, in conjunction with the New York chapter of the Architectural Institute of America, put forth a set of affordable design guidelines that could be used in both new construction and existing buildings to make them safer.

Architects are only one part of the solution to making buildings safer. Developers have to see the importance as well and their concerns are more about square footage and the bottom line, than appealing to social concerns. They do not want to increase the costs of construction nor, in the case of commercial buildings, lose rentable floor space to features such as wider stairwells “just in case”.

The next steps in my project are to find out:

-The exact costs to include the affordable design features that SOM put forth (the costs are low per square foot, somewhere below $30, which is very inexpensive considering how much more money goes into other materials).
-Why developers are not including these simple, cost-effective solutions for those “just in case” scenarios.
-The reaction of commercial and residential high-rise building users to the question, “if you knew that it would only cost X dollars per square foot to make your building safer, would you care more about building safety?”

To do the above, I have to:

-Price the materials and safety features
-Interview developers, among them I hope to talk to Larry Silverstein about the World Trade Center redevelopment
-Do some man-on-the-street interviews to see what people’s reactions would be to simple, inexpensive safety measures that could save their lives one day.

Also, in following up with my interview with Rick Bell, I have an appointment to meet with the New York chapter of the National Society of Structural Engineers, to see what improvements and innovations are being made on the structural side of things and if they are attractive to developers. I will also speak to the architects at SOM about the work they did on 7 World Trade Center.