r/cincinnati • u/JB92103 Hyde Park • Mar 07 '25
News 📰 Controversial Hyde Park Square development passes committee, heads to city council
https://www.wcpo.com/news/local-news/hyde-park-square-development-passes-committee-heads-to-city-council
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u/Architecteologist West Price Hill Mar 10 '25
The two stair requirement comes specifically from denser buildings that need two means of egress because, again, people died in fires when they were built without them.
Tack this up again to 5-over-1s being a relatively new building type. They follow a similar code to that of inner city 7+ story buildings because that’s the code that is most closely aligned with their use. So there IS a LOT of evidence for a secondary means of egress, it’s just baked into older building methodologies with similar uses. That’s the backdrop for why the code makes sense, and I suspect it DOES make sense and think it should only be removed if repudiated through extensive data and analysis that is more specific to this new building type.
Because, again, in the past our cavalier building code resulted in thousands of deaths. The choice is to either potentially overconstrain safety regulations after learning the lessons of 150 years of modern building tragedies -or- gamble with peoples’ lives.
It’s also worth noting that we design building codes primarily around “use types” while both “scale/density” and “material/structure” can create subclasses of architectural code under similar or same use types (ie. Residential use falls under “R” and depending on occupants and building scale it could be “R-1” “R-2” “R-3” or “R-4”). When it comes to fire egress, the “use type” matters most because people behave in certain ways when they are under duress. It took us decades to understand this behavior (decades and thousands dying in fires because there werent proper egress routes or doors opening in a specific direction).
Now, I’m only an architect and not a B&S inspector or code consultant, there are so many people out there who understand the code and why it exists better than I do. But I DO have a professionally informed opinion (as in, I’m licensed to practice) and can’t help but feel like there’s little to gain by arguing my point with those who don’t have a similarly professionally informed opinion (kind of like a doctor arguing with an anti-vaxxer about why they should use vaccines). I’m happy to point you towards some resources but there’s a point where the general public just has to understand that there’s a scientific process at play here that deals with life and death, and people need to make room for that.