Assistant Professor of Architecture Iman Ansari has published “De-Coding the ‘Fire-Escape’: Safeguarding Health, Safety, and Welfare in Nineteenth-century America” in issue 51 of Thresholds, the peer-reviewed journal produced by the MIT Department of Architecture and distributed by the MIT Press. The essay examines the evolution of the fire escape as a legal, socio-technical, medical, and architectural device, that navigated multiple professional bureaucratic frameworks in the nineteenth century.

Threshold 51: Heat includes peer-reviewed essays and critical creative works from art, architecture, and related fields that take enthalpy—the thermodynamic property that comprises heat, pressure, and volume to effect change —as its guiding principle.

Whether we say “that’s hot!” to describe aesthetic judgement, sensory perception, or the absence of either, heat persists—no matter its presence on the front or back burner.

Since heat helps us navigate the material world as a tool, medium, and affect, a serious consideration of heat requires us to come to terms with the fragility of the system in which we take part—both voluntarily and involuntarily. And though temperature is regularly mapped across graphs and thermometers, the feeling of heat is often so localised and so personal that it evades historical perception altogether. Heat’s ubiquity and evasiveness force us to confront and map heat’s location within art and architecture.

Read more at Threshold