Acknowledgments




First and foremost, I would like to thank Professor Nik Luka for allowing me to write a paper on exit stairs for the final assignment of an urban planning course and subsequent encouragement that I continue the work. To Meg Graham, Andre D’Elia, Shea Gallagher and my former colleagues at Superkul, thank you for your sustained enthusiasm and the vote of confidence to get serious about submitting for code change. To Janna Levitt and the best of code consultants, David Hine, thank you for your unwavering support and help navigating the murky waters of a code change request.

To close friends, roommates and colleagues for their blunt advice, studio snacks and motivational speeches, especially Josh, other Josh, Michael Nugent, Genna, Christina, Keyan and Alex. To my childhood neighbours at Pizolstrasse 7, especially Erika + Claude, thank you for the amazing memories of growing up in a single stair apartment building.

I would not have been able to produce such an extensive review of jurisdictions if it wasn’t for the help of an international network of talented young designers and foreign language experts - Lucy, Martha, Peter, Roni, Johno, Irene, Stefania, Anna, Ana-Luis, Yasaman and Louie. In addition, thank you to Dan Shapira,Luis Oliveira, Marc-Andre Plourde and fire engineers David Hine, Karl Wallasch and Boris Stock.

I’d like to thank DIALOG Architects for generously supporting this research as benefactor of the 2021 Architectural Scholarship in Honour of Michael Evamy.



Lastly, this work is dedicated to a certain professor who insisted that every building must obviously have two staircases.