Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Pyrotechnic Cities : Architecture, Fire-Safety and Standardisation, Paperback / softback Book

Pyrotechnic Cities : Architecture, Fire-Safety and Standardisation Paperback / softback

Part of the Routledge Research in Architecture series

Paperback / softback

Description

This book explores the relationship between architecture, government and fire.

It posits that, through the question of fire-safety standardisation, building design comes to be both a problem for, and a tool of, government.

Through a close study of fire-safety standards it demonstrates the shaping effect that architecture and the city have on the way we think about governing. Opening with an investigation into the Grenfell Tower fire and the political actors who sought to enrol it in programmes of governmental reform before contextualising the research in current literature, the book takes four city studies, each beginning with a specific historic fire: The 1654 Great Fire of Meirecki, Edo; the 1877 town fire of Lagos; the 1911 Empire Palace Theatre fire, Edinburgh; and the 2001 World Trade Centre attack, New York.

Each study identifies the governmental response to the fire, safety standards and codes designed in its wake and how these new processes spread and change. Drawing on the work of sociologists John Law and Anne Marie Mol and their concept of ‘Fire Space’, it describes the way that architectural design, through the medium of fire, is an instrument of political agency.

Pyrotechnic Cities is a critical investigation into these political implications, written for academics, researchers and students in architectural history and theory, infrastructure studies and governance.

Information

Other Formats

£39.99

 
Free Home Delivery

on all orders

 
Pick up orders

from local bookshops

Information