Building Codes Are Written in Ash

Every time I am in London the sheer number of fire exit signs always grabs my attention. The fire code is the only book in your office written entirely by the dead. It does not read that way. It reads like the most boring document ever committed to paper - door swing directions, flame spread indices, maximum travel distance to an exit, the required width of a corridor measured in inches. No names. No photographs. No flowers. Just load ratings and stair pitch, set in a typeface chosen by a committee that hated joy. And yet nearly every clause is a headstone with the name filed off. The provenance of boringExit doors must swing outward in the direction of egress. That sentence is 146 garment workers in Manhattan, March 1911, pressed against doors that opened inward and were locked to stop pilferage. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire did not teach us anything about combustion. It taught us about the physics of a crowd, which is that a panicked human being is not a person but a fluid, and…