Fire Escape

Rayyane Tabet (b. 1983, Ashqout, Lebanon) lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon. For Fire Escape, Tabet takes a New York fire escape from a building slated for demolition and brings it to the High Line. The work demonstrates how the city has been shaped by the formal and material consequences of its successive department of building codes, most notably, the 1860 requirement of an additional egress on tenement buildings, the 1901 mandate for fire escapes, and 1968 ban on construction of external fire escapes.