Archinect - News

At least 200,000 residential structures in New York City are at risk of seismic damage: NYT

2024-04-11T17:38:00-04:00

The five boroughs are home to more than 200,000 multifamily buildings made with un-reinforced brick and built from the mid-1800s to the 1930s, according to a city hazard plan. Many rowhouses across the city neighborhoods fall into this category. Such masonry cannot bend or flex during an earthquake and would instead break or crumble. A strong earthquake could cause some buildings of this type to collapse.

Last week’s 4.8 magnitude tri-state quake wasn’t nearly as strong as the (estimated) 5.5 magnitude incident that occurred on August 10, 1884, and would have caused $4.7 billion worth of damage to the modern city, according to the New York Times.

Experts have warned that the risk posed to New York City, even after its amended 1995 building codes called for “seismic gaps” between buildings, remains at least faintly plausible.

A 2002 Times article on earthquake preparedness in the Big Apple states the probability of a magnitude 6.0 or higher event occurring even once in the next 19,500 years is still "unlikely."

The USGS-documented sinking of buildings in Manhattan, meanwhile, is happening at a rate of between 1 to 2 millimeters per year.

Strict building codes prevented a larger catastrophe in earthquake-prone Taiwan

2024-04-03T19:22:00-04:00

The 7.4 magnitude that struck eastern Taiwan yesterday has provided evidence as to how the country’s reputedly strong building codes and regulations prevented significant losses of life and property 25 years after another tragic seismic event led to widespread change.

"Taiwan’s earthquake preparedness is among the most advanced in the world," Stephen Gao, a seismologist and professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology, told the AP. "The island has implemented strict building codes, a world-class seismological network, and widespread public education campaigns on earthquake safety."

This state of preparedness is credited to government action following a September 1999 earthquake with a magnitude of 7.7 that caused 2,400 deaths and damage to over 50,000 buildings on the island. Another factor within this are business and governmental conditions inside Taiwan, which is worth comparing to Turkey's response to an earthquake that occurred there the month before the same year...

Schools and communities in the Pacific Northwest hope for improved building code standards for earthquake preparedness

2024-01-04T08:35:00-05:00

Current seismic codes require public buildings to be built strong enough so they don’t fall down in a quake. Now, some emergency preparedness advocates want to raise the bar. Not only should essential buildings resist collapse in a strong earthquake, but also newly constructed schools, in particular, should be built so in the immediate aftermath they can be counted on to serve as relief centers.

The article mentions the AIA Oregon chapter’s efforts to push lawmakers towards adopting more stringent building codes in preparation for a cataclysmic 9.0 Cascadia earthquake. Some relatively cheaper proactive measures, such as tsunami towers, are being enacted, but the 1,000 or so schools thought to be at risk for collapse statewide just a few years ago still need to enact drastic changes whose costs are proving too much of a burden for local administrators to get behind.

“A lot of districts have been building schools and not doing this,” local Portland-based architect Jay Raskin explains. “Every year we go without requiring that schools be capable of being used as shelters is a year we miss providing shelter for the surrounding neighborhoods during a Cascadia earthquake.”

Another vote on the Oregon legislation is not expected until at least 2025.

A new LA Times map shows 6,000 structures in need of seismic retrofit across Los Angeles

2023-12-18T12:17:00-05:00

The LA Times recently debuted a useful map of seismic retrofit projects in major sections of the city months after official updates to the building code were enacted to address risks posed to soft-story and non-ductile concrete structures before 2033.

The map was made by surveying available records from Los Angeles, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, and Pasadena. More than 6,000 of the 16,000 buildings in the dataset are categorized as still requiring retrofits, including many homes and offices built before 1996.

Clusters of buildings in Pasadena’s Old Town and near the California Institute of Technology, most sections of Downtown LA and its nearby constituents (Koreatown, Jefferson Park, and Pico-Union), and a large swath of Hollywood between Beverly Hills and La Brea Avenue contain the majority of what has yet to receive seismic retrofits. The year ahead should see a decisive turnaround, as 60% of the yet-to-be-retrofitted soft-story buildings in the city are mandated to be completed ...

Conservation expert cautions: Narratives about traditional earthen architecture and the Moroccan earthquake are flawed

2023-09-18T14:37:00-04:00

The rush to blame the destruction that ensued in the wake of this month’s devastating 6.9 magnitude earthquake in Morocco on rammed earth and the region's other traditional earthen construction methods is a flawed conjecture, according to an explanation penned recently by University of York lecturer Louise Cooke.

In an article featured in The Conversation over the weekend, Cooke refuted some of what she calls inaccuracies latent in the popular media narrative about the country’s traditional architectures, namely that their structural designs make them susceptible to collapses during seismic events. She says the popular consensus about traditional architecture is a mischaracterization, adding that the disaster’s true culprit lies in a hastened shift away from age-old building and maintenance methods caused by outside influence from modern Western design.

“In the immediate aftermath of an earthquake, it is common for local building cultures to be blamed for their own destruction,” the...

San Francisco has over 3,400 concrete buildings at risk of seismic collapse

2023-05-25T17:00:00-04:00

Famous historic sites, low-income apartments and Twitter's headquarters all appear on a previously unpublished draft list of 3,407 concrete buildings in San Francisco that may be at high risk of collapse in a major earthquake, according to a copy of a city government document obtained by NBC News through a public records request.

The city says the list is still a “preliminary draft inventory” of at-risk concrete structures, some of which were built after 2000, according to NBC. Who will actually pay for the mass retrofits still hasn’t been hammered out yet, leaving many to speculate as to its near-term feasibility. Some engineers expect the compliance effort to take decades. Current U.S. Geological Survey predictions state the Bay Area faces a 20% risk of suffering a 7.5 magnitude quake or higher in the next 30 years.

Twitter's potential move out of its historic Market Street headquarters (which is also one of the buildings on the list) is starting to make a lot more sense.

World’s tallest full-scale building earthquake test takes place at UC San Diego

2023-05-10T15:09:00-04:00

UC San Diego has hosted the tallest full-scale seismic building test on an earthquake simulator. The LEVER Architecture-designed 10-story building, made of cross-laminated timber, was tested on what the organizers say is the world’s largest outdoor shake table.

Image credit: UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Tests on the structure began in late April, where a shake table simulated earthquake motions recorded during prior earthquakes covering a range of magnitude 4 to magnitude 8 on the Richter scale. The range also included various iterations of the 6.7 magnitude Northridge Earthquake which struck Los Angeles in 1994.

Image credit: UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

The shake table used in the test has been designed to “reproduce the full 3D ground motions that occur during earthquakes” including a movement of up to six degrees of freedom. Atop the table is what the team has dubbed the Tallwood building: A 116-foot-tall cross-laminated timber structure roughly one-fifth...

Los Angeles publishes list of 33 county-owned structures most at-risk in an earthquake

2023-03-30T11:49:00-04:00

In the wake of last month’s devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria, Los Angeles County has identified some 33 important structures it says are the most at risk during a major seismic event of that magnitude.

Last week, the Board of Supervisors published a list of at-risk properties owned by the county that must be upgraded in line with modern standards over the next ten years, according to KTLA.

The county has already mandated changes to its building codes that call for similar upgrades to all non-ductile concrete high-rises and soft-story residential structures before the year 2033. Officials are wary of the “Big One” — a magnitude 7.8 or above quake — that would kill as many as 1,800 people and destroy an estimated 2,000 structures in the area per the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

“We never thought that spending the money on retrofitting these buildings was worth the risk,” U...

Los Angeles updates its building codes in wake of deadly Turkey-Syria earthquake

2023-03-02T12:30:00-05:00

Los Angeles County’s Board of Supervisors voted Wednesday to approve a motion requiring all non-ductile, concrete high-rise structures in LA County to be given seismic retrofits within the next ten years.

The motion applies to all incorporated communities in the county and must be codified by the directors of public works within six months according to the supervisors. The update comes as multiple LA media outlets reported widespread weak spots across the region in response to the February 6th Turkey-Syria Earthquake that killed more than 50,000.

Under the updated building codes, current building owners have a ten-year time period in which to submit structural evaluation assessments to the agency. Properties will either be retrofitted or demolished according to the language put forth by Supervisors Holly Mitchell and Hilda Solis.

“The county should follow the example of surrounding jurisdict...

Turkey’s outdated building codes exacerbated earthquake destruction

2023-02-10T12:23:00-05:00

Why did so many buildings fall down? [...] [Alanna Simpson] says the building codes in Turkey were updated again in 2018. But the country's "legacy buildings" are still vulnerable, and that goes for much of the rest of the world, too, she says. "It's a global problem."

Of the more than 3,000 Turkish structures destroyed by Monday’s devastating earthquake, experts say the majority were concrete and masonry infill constructions built before Turkey updated its building codes in the wake of the 1999 İzmit earthquake that killed 17,000. A 2018 construction amnesty on 75,000 new buildings put even more people at risk.

The next quake could yield even more damage, as the Associated Press reported some 13 million apartments are not in compliance with modern standards.

The New York Times has a case study from one badly affected city here.

Resilient housing prototypes designed by Marvel Architects utilized a range of self-sustaining strategies to survive Hurricane Fiona

2022-09-23T12:00:00-04:00

After Hurricane Fiona tore through Puerto Rico on Sunday [Sept. 18], roads in the small mountain city of Caguas—hit with more than 20 inches of rain—were underwater. Landslides washed away some streets. As on the rest of the island, the electric grid went down, and it wasn’t clear how many homes had been damaged or destroyed. But in two new prototype homes, the electricity stayed on.

The prototypes are single-family homes completely off-grid with electricity and potable water. They were designed by New York City and Puerto Rico-based Marvel Architects and paid for by nonprofit Acacia Network. The homes utilize hurricane and seismic-resistant components, which include an insulated concrete panel system that has shown to be just as if not more effective against earthquakes than traditional concrete block construction. They also employ passive design strategies, allowing natural cross ventilation, heat extraction, and shade. In addition, the structures are modular so that they can adapt to a variety of locations and square footage.

Jonathan Marvel, the firm's founder, addressed the cost of these resilient homes with Fast Company's Adele Peters stating, "I don't want to say 'affordable,' because the average Puerto Rican income is below the level of poverty in the United States. So this is a housing system that's going to require assistance to build." Marvel added th...

Tsunami Towers are about to spring up along the Pacific Northwest shorelines

2022-02-08T12:37:00-05:00

“The fact of the matter is that if a tsunami occurs tomorrow, we are going to lose all of our children,” said Andrew Kelly, the superintendent of the North Beach School District, which includes Ocean Shores. Mr. Kelly is one of a growing number of local officials who are calling for a network of elevated buildings and platforms along the Northwest coast that could provide an escape for thousands of people who might otherwise be doomed in the event of a tsunami.

Voters in the Washington state community of Ocean Shores will decide today on a measure that would install a pair of tsunami towers that can hold up to 800 people. Residents in the immediate shoreline region would have only ten minutes to escape potentially 100-foot waves propelled by a quake in the shallow offshore Cascadia subduction zone. The state estimates that around 70,000 people would be trapped in low-lying areas that have no bluffs or tall buildings which can be used as an escape.

The elevated steel platforms can be placed on top of parking garages, schools, and other structures to achieve a safe vertical distance from the inundation, although many such buildings in the area are not sufficiently seismic-ready to withstand magnitude 9.0 tremors. Washington has proposed 58 such towers, which cost around $3 million each to construct. To date, only two structures have been completed: one at a facility operated by Oregon State University, and the other, at Ocosta Elementary Sc...

Statewide earthquake alert system set to debut in California

2019-10-17T15:00:00-04:00

On Thursday, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services will unveil an app created by UC Berkeley that will give all Californians who download it on iOS and Android phones the chance to get earthquake early warnings from any corner of the state. Authorities will also begin issuing quake early warnings through the Wireless Emergency Alerts system, offering text message alerts even for people who have not downloaded the app.

The new warning system will alert Californians who have the app when an earthquake registering at level 3 on the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale strikes nearby. The state will send out text message alerts over its Wireless Emergency Alerts system to anyone within range of a level 4 trembler.

Richard Allen, director of the Berkeley Seismology Lab that helped to develop the app, told The Los Angeles Times,“We cannot promise you a perfect system, [but] the system seems to be performing reasonably well.”

Throwaway cities vs seismic resilience: How American and Japanese buildings don't follow the same path towards earthquake safety

2019-07-31T19:18:00-04:00

Japan, through both government mandates and its engineering culture, builds stronger structures capable of withstanding earthquakes and being used immediately afterward. The United States sets a minimum and less protective standard with the understanding that many buildings will be badly damaged. The two approaches reflect different attitudes toward risk, the role of government and collective social responsibility.

The NYT takes a look at the drastically differing approaches (and ideologies behind them) towards earthquake safety in Japan compared with the United States and asks experts what would be at stake in the greater, urban picture in the anticipated event of a very big earthquake.

"The debate over whether to build more resilient buildings in the United States has been held largely out of public view, among engineers and other specialists," the piece goes. "But at stake is whether places like Silicon Valley, Seattle, Salt Lake City, San Francisco or Los Angeles might be forced to shut down after a direct hit — and for how long."

In this shake table test, the building model on the right is equipped with a seismic base isolation. Image: Valentin Shustov/Wikimedia Commons.

While strict regulations and advances in seismic engineering in Japan appear to favor base-isolated structures to allow tall buildings to resist the shaking ground, the regulation-averse American construction industry over...

A quick refresher on architecture’s continuing battle with earthquakes

2019-07-09T12:45:00-04:00

With earthquakes in the news following a pair of recent tremors in California, it’s important to remember that seismic design is an integral and increasingly complex aspect of building design architects work hard to address. An ever-improving standard, seismic codes not only save lives, but also help to shape the built environment, and in places like California, play a large role in terms of building design, overall.

Below is a round-up of some of Archinect's recent earthquake-related coverage.

Changing seismic codes and other earthquake-related issues are currently coming online in many American cities, including in Seattle, where new seismic standards for tall buildings have prompted worries about the safety of certain types of existing buildings.

Seattle boosts seismic construction standards for new skyscrapers, but older high-rises are biggest concern

In San Francisco, seismic concerns run deeper than meets the eye. There, much of the city's downtown is built atop landfill are...

Seattle boosts seismic construction standards for new skyscrapers, but older high-rises are biggest concern

2018-12-31T16:21:00-05:00

Researchers found the sedimentary basin under [Seattle] can amplify the type of ground motion that’s hardest on high-rises by a factor of two to five — much more than previous estimates. In response, Seattle and Bellevue are boosting seismic standards for new buildings 240 feet or taller [...] But the prospect of stronger shaking also raises concerns about older high-rises

Are San Francisco skyscrapers prepared for the next big earthquake?

2018-04-23T19:09:00-04:00

San Francisco lives with the certainty that the Big One will come. But the city is also putting up taller and taller buildings clustered closer and closer together because of the state’s severe housing shortage. Now those competing pressures have prompted an anxious rethinking of building regulations. Experts are sending this message: The building code does not protect cities from earthquakes nearly as much as you might think.

Taking a hard look at San Francisco's building codes, this NY Times piece goes in depth on what it means for city high rises if the next big earthquake hit. From the 1906 earthquake and fire to current seismic safety, concerns revolve around the number of skyscrapers built on liquefaction zones and buildings left damaged beyond repair.

With cases such as the sinking Millennium Tower and many more high rises planned for the city, San Francisco's seismic risk and building codes are currently being reassessed. The Tall Building Study is the first detailed database of more than 160 high rises, classifying structures by building type.

Taiwan earthquake: tin cans found as fillers may have caused high-rise to collapse

2016-02-08T13:22:00-05:00

Taiwan's Government has ordered an investigation into the collapse of a high-rise building in an earthquake after it emerged tin cans had been used in its construction. Rescue workers found the cans as they searched for survivors two days after the 6.4-magnitude earthquake that has killed at least 37 people.

However, an engineer speaking to Taiwanese TV news channel CNA explained how using cans in construction was not necessarily illegal: “For such purposes in construction, it was not illegal prior to September 1999, but since then styrofoam and formwork boards have been used instead.”

In Los Angeles, landlords and tenants will share seismic retrofit costs

2016-01-14T11:00:00-05:00

Renters and apartment owners must equally share the financial burden of earthquake retrofitting, the Los Angeles City Council agreed Wednesday, capping a more than year-long debate that allows the city to begin implementing the most sweeping mandatory seismic laws in the nation. [...] Owners can pass half the retrofit costs to tenants through rent increases over a 10-year period, with a maximum increase of $38 per month.

Shigeru Ban builds earthquake-proof homes in Nepal: "I'm encouraging people to copy my ideas. No copyrights."

2015-12-30T12:10:00-05:00

After twin earthquakes in April and May claimed 9,000 lives and left vast swathes of Nepal in ruins, survivors worried if they reused the brick rubble, they would end up with the same vulnerable, seismically unsound structures. [...] Shigeru Ban - who helped bring global attention to humanitarian architecture and continues to influence fellow architects and disaster-relief workers - devised a solution. [...] "I'm encouraging people to copy my ideas. No copyrights," Ban said.

"While Ban said he enjoys working on grand projects commissioned by privileged people, he also wants to help people who have lost their homes, and is encouraged that many architects have followed in his footsteps."

Previously in the Archinect news:

How Chile’s strict building codes help reduce the country's earthquake casualties

2015-09-18T13:39:00-04:00

Wednesday night’s 8.3-magnitude earthquake had left 11 dead and a 175 houses damaged. While the toll wasn’t negligible, the quake — the world’s strongest this year — might have leveled less-prepared countries. “Our structural engineering is world class,” Santos, a 62-year-old engineer at the firm Ingenería Estructuras Consultoría, said by phone. “And it’s made in Chile.”

Related on Archinect:

How the Cascadia earthquake threatens America's coastal Northwest

2015-07-15T14:08:00-04:00

“Our operating assumption is that everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast.” In the Pacific Northwest, everything west of Interstate 5 covers some hundred and forty thousand square miles, including Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, Eugene, Salem (the capital city of Oregon), Olympia (the capital of Washington), and some seven million people. When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America.

What's causing the Bay Bridge's steel to corrode so rapidly?

2015-06-15T14:45:00-04:00

This relatively low-tech method is among a battery of tests that materials scientists are using to determine why several anchor rods securing the newest portion of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, the region’s busiest, failed their earthquake inspections. The first alarms sounded in 2013, when seismic tests found 32 faulty rods. They’d been sitting in a large pool of water, corroding.

Previously:

First Japanese skyscraper gets retrofitted with rooftop vibration control system

2015-06-02T15:01:00-04:00

A vibration control device to dramatically reduce shaking caused by long-period earthquake ground motion — a phenomenon in which major earthquakes shake skyscrapers slowly but severely — was shown to the media on Monday after being installed in a 55-story building in central Tokyo. [...] The companies said it is the nation’s first rooftop vibration control device against earthquakes.

Massive Hollywood project sits atop quake fault

2014-11-06T20:24:00-05:00

California’s state geologist has concluded that an active earthquake fault is underneath a massive proposed skyscraper project in Hollywood, setting the stage for a huge battle at City Hall over growth and seismic safety.

“Considering the Quake” exhibition explores the art and science in edgy seismic design

2014-01-08T20:58:00-05:00

Stand your ground, the U.S. debut of the "Considering the Quake: Seismic Design on the Edge" exhibition will be on Feb. 13, 2014 at the AIA's Center for Architecture in New York. Based on resilient-design research gathered by the exhibition's curators Professor Ghyslaine McClure and Dr. Effie Bouras, it highlights not only the artistic aspect of seismic design, but also its more hidden — and crucial — scientific side.

Here are some notable works that will be included in the upcoming exhibition:

Find out more on Bustler.