Evolution of High-rise Buildings in Vancouver, Canada

Abstract

The potential for a large earthquake to cause significant ground shaking has had a defining influence on the evolution of high-rise buildings in the City of Vancouver. However, unlike other major cities along the seismically active west coast of North America, structural steel systems and reinforced concrete moment-resisting frame systems have rarely been used. Virtually all high-rise buildings in Vancouver are concrete shear wall buildings. Older buildings, constructed up until the mid-1980s, typically have thin (200 mm or less) lightly reinforced concrete walls distributed throughout the buildings. A number of factors, such as increased seismic demands and the changing requirements of the Canadian building code, caused a paradigm shift in the 1980s so that today, almost all new high-rise buildings in Vancouver have a large central core that is designed to resist all lateral loads. Typical modern high-rise cores have three independent cantilever walls in one direction that are coupled together in the transverse direction by ductile coupling beams above the door openings on each story. The City of Vancouver has recently declared that the designs of high-rise buildings must attain a new benchmark of architectural creativity. The recent designs that have been proposed for the city include very irregular buildings that are much less likely to be habitable after an earthquake.