I cut my toe on award-winning architecture

That’s right – I cut my toe, not my teeth. Well, I cut my teeth as well on remarkable architecture by Bruce Rickard, but I’m talking about a mishap I had, not my early career! You see, a good friend invited us over to his spanking new architecturally designed home for a Boxing Day party and we thought it would be a good idea to bring our dog so he could play with their dog. Big mistake. Our doggo decided to jump into the local swamp and then shook it all over everyone’s nice Christmas garb. Well, that went down like a ton of bricks. I grabbed the naughty mud-skipper and headed for the garden hose.

Dogs have a sixth sense about when they’re about to get washed and, sure enough, my dog made a dash for it up concrete steps with me attached to him.

Up – or should I say, down – I went onto the steps, and my thong flipped down at the front, opening up my toe for a collision course with the front edge of the step (in architectural parlance – the ‘nosing’).

After more fluster, mud and a dog-wrestle, I’d finally scrubbed him clean. Job done, I could go back to the party and finish that cold beer I’d been halfway through when the mud monster appeared.

Not quite.

I had cut my toe quite badly, so that cold beer would have to wait. I needed first aid and my mate’s wife is a doctor (well, a psychologist – but I needed some mental first aid too at this point).

While I was being tended to with multiple band-aids, I inspected the killer nosing and found it to be quite sharp. I didn’t know you could get concrete to be so sharp!

It got me thinking about a safety in design course I had done and it got me thinking that the architect of this sweet pad had selected aesthetics over safety when designing the steps. It also got me thinking of another architect I once worked for who lambasted me for detailing stairs with a rounded nosing as opposed to a square edge (like these killer steps!). And then it got me asking: What’s wrong with us architects that we would choose aesthetics over safety?!

Seriously though, a square-edged stair does look better, unless you’re being dragged up them by your dog. Unfortunately, sometimes safety comes at an aesthetic cost. Just think about all those annoying fluorescent sandpaper treads people put on stairs so that people don’t slip. Some architects spend hours attempting to design around these types of safety requirements, especially balustrades. Sometimes this works, sometimes it just doesn’t.

Safety in design legislation requires all building designers to consider not only the safety of buildings once completed, but during their construction and eventual demolition. This can be a daunting task for building designers: how can we anticipate every possible danger in a building’s lifetime? Fortunately, we can learn from the mistakes of the past and then we just need to throw in a little bit of intuition. Now that we have powerful 3D modelling software, it’s pretty standard to have a virtual model built before the real thing, so we can better anticipate these kind of design issues. Fire modelling software already simulates a fire in a building and it measures how long it will take for all residents to vacate the building. I can foresee a time in the future that the computer model will sound alarms if it finds any safety issues in the design as you design it.

In the case of the killer stairs: when I have a chat to the architect about his nosings, I’ll tell him a pencil round edge would have looked just as nice as a square edge – and my toe says so too!