Correspondence on A State-of-the-art Review of Computer Programs for the Detailed Design of Reinforc

The President: The steel hull has been with us for a long time, and I understand that no disasters can be identified as resulting from lowered buckling resistance caused by welding or any other distortion. What use. then, will be made of the facts that Dr. Carlsen has discovered? Will they simply permit us to carry on as we always have, albeit with a greater sense of security? Will they require extra measures to be taken to avoid the dangers in question? Or will they enable us to design hulls with adequate security at lower thicknesses and, presumably, lower cost?

Miss Margaret Law (Ove Arup): I should like to comment on the fire engineering design for this building, since the structure under discussion does not have any fire cladding. It might seem surprising that a theatre holding 750 people which has no structural fire protection at all was deemed acceptable. In our development of the fire safety measures for the Royal Exchange Theatre, we adopted a design approach to fire safety, by setting out our objectives explicitly, rather than trying to meet the letter of the building regulations. For example, it was by no means clear whether the theatre or the Great Hall should be defined as the 'building' for the purposes of the regulations.

Fire protection regulations Mr. M. P. Ashmead drew attention to the disparate requirements of local authorities for fire protection design of steel frameworks (June l979), and his views in this respect, although not his proposals in their entirety, were shared by Mr. J. A. Tanner (September 1979). Mr. P. Nickson also disagrees with Mr. Ashmead's proposed applied loads when he writes: Further to the letter of Mr. M. P. Ashmead, regarding different cases for consideration for the design of stanchions in single-storey buildings and their fire protection, I feel that an addition to his four design methods is necessary. Verulam