[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

> Unfortunately, there was still a problem–the city couldn’t overlook the building codes. But Casagrande found a loophole: He declared that since the houses had been handmade, they were a form of art. “The city commissioned me to make a public artwork, and Treasure Hill is the artwork. That’s where [people] live now,” he said. “That’s how they rationalized it.”

That ignores the purpose of the building codes even artists can die in fires (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire). This is especially worse when you have families and children living there.

This city of the future sounds like nothing I want a part of.

[tdeck]

Not only fires, but also earthquakes which are common in Taiwan.

[the__alchemist]

This is a controversial take. As an example, compare apartment buildings in the US, (2 stairwells required for exit in case of fire) vice in Europe.

The tradeoff: The US apartments are theoretically easier to evacuate in case of fire. They are also consequently poorly laid out of use, with ugly central hallways, and only one side of windows on most apartments.

[aaron695]

Good to see a Hacker is now being a bureaucrat reading books of city codes over Neuromancer.

These are peoples homes, the danger is probably less than many US ghettos or homeless encampments, how about we start bulldozing those which are unsafe and ugly if people homes have no meaning.

There's no reason you cant make communities not up to spec with current building codes safe. This is normal for historic buildings which have exceptions.

The Ghost Ship fire was a concert, I don't believe any killed were residents.

> This city of the future sounds like nothing I want a part of.

Nothing like never leaving the safety of the suburban home I guess, the new hacker ethos.

[whythre]

Surely there is middle ground here- I agree with the general sentiment though; the perfect need not be the enemy of the good.

[vidarh]

I don't really think your comment contradicts the comment you reply to - as you point out one way of addressing the failure to meet building codes is to make those communities safe.

But just defining their around the lack of safety is a poor option. It's hard to tell from the article whether they just worked around the bureaucracy without fixing the issues or if they made it safe in non-standard ways too. And so everyone would probably be better served if there was a process for handling exceptions that actually assessed and documented that a non-standard method was used and that someone signed it off as safe enough, so that ambiguity wasn't there.

(And the world of Neuromancer isn't one I'd like to live in, as much as I loved reading about it)

[hutzlibu]

In general I agree with your sentiment, but I think one can do alternative living without building codes, that is safe and clean unlike the ghost ship apparently was, and also:

"The Ghost Ship fire was a concert, I don't believe any killed were residents."

"One victim of the fire was a building resident."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Ship_warehouse_fire

They knew they had faulty electricity and they had a small fire before.

[alwa]

Sounds like it’s all masonry construction, isn’t that fireproof?

Not to be flip: I too wouldn’t want to live in a society where improvisation were the construction norm. But it’s not clear to me that all code requirements are life- or safety-critical.

It sounds like Treasure Hill was in fact emptied and “renovated” in the course of this “artist village” process [0]. One imagines that such a process may have addressed the life-critical deficiencies even if it couldn’t meet the more nitpicky code requirements that might apply to normal development.

[0] https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/treasure-hill-taipei

[bruce511]

>> But it’s not clear to me that all code requirements are life- or safety-critical.

It depends somewhat on your definition of "critical. The 50s didn't have seat belts, and clearly most people survived. So "few" died in cars that there was opposition to year introduction.

I was recently in a country where smoke alarms are not "a thing". As is no-one had one, they simply don't exist. Sure there's the odd residential fire , but they're rare - single digits per year. Ladders kill more people than fire, but we sell a ladder to anyone, and you don't need a degree to climb one.

Building regulations are an important way of keeping people safe. They're a stamp of quality to buyers. Unfortunately they also seem to want to cover 100% of all cases all the time. And that final 0.01% is expensive, and time consuming. Which delays, or denies projects. Which results in fewer places to live. Which, dare I suggest, leads to homeless deaths.

Safety standards -are- important. Buildings falling down, or going up in flames, is obviously really bad. But equally not-building-at-all is dangerous. And regulators seem to give very little weight to that when adding another regulation.

[lostlogin]

Your view is a common one, but the flip side of that is cost.

Ask someone to make a flood, earthquake and fireproof building and they can price it up and decide if they want to proceed.

One maimed human from an accident/incident/event that could have been prevented, and the cost can dwarf the expense of building better.

The Pacific rim is somewhere that is fairly prone to natural disasters. Here in NZ, an earthquake in Christchurch [1] killed 185 people, 115 of them in a single building that didn’t meet the building code. If that building’s defects were known, and it had been classed a work of art, that makes the situation worse in my view.

As others have noted, you can make old buildings safer. Can’t they do that?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Christchurch_earthquake

[bruce511]

I suspect we're both arguing the same thing - that some level of regulation is important.

Clearly if you are in an earthquake zone then earthquake protection are high on the list. If you are on a flood plain, then flooding needs to be managed send so on.

Now for my next part, I run the risk of being flippant. That's not my goal. Clearly the building code failed those 115 people, and their loss is 115 families in mourning. But, and I say this with all due contrition, that "only" 185 people died is a measure of regulation success, not failure. One building collapsed, but most survived (at least enough for people to get out safely.)

No doubt that building will be learned from, and there will be efforts to make every building perfectly safe. As you point out some building may be too expensive to rehabilitate.

Should those buildings be demolished? It's easy to count the dead from one gat fell down. It's harder to count the deaths from no-building, or a demolished building.

Obviously in an earthquake zone, earthquake regs are critical. No argument there.

But what about a million small regs that add up to real cost, but offer minimal gains? Each seems, in isolation, to be Important, but their collective protection seems marginal.

Again, it can seem cavalier to say "good enough", when "perfect" saves lives. Its easy to count lives cost with "good enough". It's harder to count lives lost to "perfect".

[mantas]

If we know the building was not up to code, we already learned those lessons. Didn’t we? The only lesson left is to, maybe, enforce the code?

[bruce511]

That's one interpretation. The other is that the building predated to code, and it was impossible, or too expensive, to retrofit the building.

Alas I do not live in Christchurch so I can't comment to this specific case. However, in general new buildings are subject to new codes, where old buildings may not be.