Proof (Saving the City)

In 1752, the year Benjamin Franklin is credited with the invention of the lightning rod, he also established the first American fire insurance company. The coincidence of these innovations prefigures the parallel development and interwoven relationships between invention, building insurance, and legislation that underlie the production of architecture today. Industrialization brought new threats to the city (e.g. electricity, speed, explosives) while also dramatically increasing the scale of historical perils (e.g. flood, fire, theft). In turn, these threats gave rise to a field of new products, accessory to conventional building. In their early forms, the automatic sprinkler, exterior fire escape, panic bar, emergency light, and theft alarm were, like Franklin’s lightning rod, ready for production and deployment on a large scale, without definitive spatial identity, and suitable for use in new or existing construction. Negotiating the thresholds between the developing infrastructures of the city and its private spaces (as insured and legally defined), these devices may be understood collectively as a crumple zone intended not to prevent architectural emergency but to absorb, limit, and contain its effects.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Intl.2018.41

Volume Editors
Ángela García de Paredes, Iñaqui Carnicero & Julio Salcedo-Fernandez

ISBN
978-1-944214-18-0