Vive La Résistance? Standard fire testing, regulation, and the performance of safety

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ABSTRACT Because fire safety cannot be measured directly, building regulation uses test ratings to determine whether materials and products meet societal expectations. Fire resistance constitutes the most enduring means of gauging fire safety, providing ratings for how elements of structure perform in a standard furnace test. Although it has long been known that this test is unrepresentative of real building fires, fire resistance testing remains central to building regulation because it has proved useful. This utility stems not just from the perceived value of the test metric as a proxy for building fire safety, but also from its role as a boundary object that facilitates regulation amongst diverse practitioners. Although fire science has developed greatly since the fire resistance test standard was defined, fire scientists are no longer a relevant social group; closure around the test standard is now widely embedded in regulations and industry practice. Advances in fire science offer the prospect of first principles fire safety engineering that can enable bespoke building solutions that are more optimised than those embedded in the conservative one-size-fits-all regulations based on fire resistance, but adherence to the fire resistance approach means most practitioners lack sufficient knowledge to make safe use of new design methods. Testing orientated to fundamental understanding has been neglected, presenting an obstacle to the innovative solutions required for the built environment in the twenty-first century.