Construction Maison

In January 2015, a massive fire in Edgewater, N.J., demonstrated that buildings with sprinkler systems are not always protected against fire. The blaze destroyed 240 residential apartments and displaced 500 people from the Edgewater Avalon apartment building . The fire began when a maintenance worker’s plumbing torch accidentally ignited wooden wall studs , and flames quickly spread throughout the structure. Fifteen minutes passed before workers called the fire department . In that time, the fire spread throughout combustible void spaces (between walls and floors) and soon engulfed the building. Emergency personnel from 35 different cities and towns ultimately responded to the incident. Thankfully, there were no fatalities. Immediately after the blaze, people asked why the fire was so devastating. The building had sprinklers, after all. Shouldn’t the sprinkler system have extinguished the fire? To make matters worse , this building had already burned down 15 years prior during i...

The Late Victorian period in the United States—roughly the last third of the 19th century—produced some of the most beautiful neighborhoods in the history of Western civilization . It also produced some of the most hopeless slums. In response to the crisis of industrial cities, the modern discipline of city planning emerged . The tools of this new profession helped clean up many unhealthy aspects of urban industry , but also stifled some of the best innovations of Late Victorian urbanism . By the 1920s, planners in the industrial world had established the legal authority to promulgate land-use regulations, and over the next generation, they succeeded at slowing the construction of slum housing and segregating noxious industries from incompatible activities, such as housing and office space. Through some of the same devices, however, planners curtailed some positive features of 19th- century urbanism , including the rich variety of free- form industrial development and the adaptiv...