This coming Tuesday, Tom Leslie and I will speak in the last of our paired lectures hosted virtually by the Skyscraper Museum. The first three lectures were on Foundations, Frames, and Facades, with Tom discussing developments in Chicago and me doing the same for New York. The last lecture is on Fire. As I’m getting the slides ready, it occurs to me that the order is perfect: my discussion for this last lecture is only really possible by building on what I’ve been talking about in the previous weeks. The lecture will be available, like the others, as a zoom webinar direct from the museum and as a YouTube livestream.
The picture above is from the forensic report into the effect of a severe fire at the Parker Building, a loft on Fourth Avenue that failed in unexpected ways. Much of the history of fire-protection came from post-disaster analysis like this.