Recovery-based design of buildings for seismic resilience

Abstract

Design of buildings for earthquakes plays a central role in community resilience and is guided by building codes to incorporate performance-based design criteria as an alternative to the traditional prescriptive design approach. This change is indicative of an ongoing shift in design philosophy to address a broad range of performance targets such as financial and functionality objectives, in addition to safety. While this represents an important step forward, the next step warrants an approach that not only defines and achieves performance targets through traditional risk-based approaches, but also prepares for cases in which such targets are not achieved, and the building must recover from reduced functionality. Here we show that design enhancements based on improving recoverability, rather than reducing risk, can significantly improve building resilience in terms of the loss of functionality experienced after seismic events of varying intensity, while also producing financially attractive design alternatives to decision makers. The comparative evaluations presented herein illuminate the relative effectiveness of one such design in terms of resilience, while quantifying performance through metrics that are vital to the decision making process. We demonstrate that designing buildings for recoverability represents a viable design philosophy from both resilience and financial loss perspectives. A link between the vast and continually expanding repertoire of structural technologies capable of enhancing building recovery and the ever-growing concern for resilience in building design can be further developed and strengthened through continued investigation of recovery-enhancing structural technologies through the lens of resilience both at the building and community levels.