Fire safety in buildings with atria

Abstract

Atria are commonly used in the design of buildings to improve the environment of the space. Nevertheless the current Spanish codes do not address the fire safety concerns associated with this type of building.
A new draft code, the "Código Técnico de la Edificación .. (CTE), proposes a series of measures to address the issue of fire safety in atria, based on the approach adopted by the British atrium codeo. In order to simplify the application of the measures, buildings are classified according to use and appropriate measures are presented in a tabulated format. As could be expected from such an approach, the simplification of the pro cess imposes limits on design flexibility, and given a set of prescribed solutions, the designer would often not be able to achieve the ideal building form.
This article discusses the limits of a prescriptive approach to fire safety in buildings with atria , and describes an alternative approach based on fire engineering principles that offers the architect more design flexibilty .