La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is currently 135 years into its construction, with an expected co... more La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is currently 135 years into its construction, with an expected completion date of 2026. Since its inception by Antoni Gaudi in 1882, radical analysis and design methods have been required to imagine its architectural form and understand the engineering performance of what will be, once complete, the tallest church in the world. Gaudi famously used hanging chain models to realise the catenary form of his structures, a method which pre-empted modern form-finding software and enabled him to devise an organic optimised form long before this could be achieved with computers.
The last catastrophic seismic events in Nepal have shown that the Nepalese school building stock ... more The last catastrophic seismic events in Nepal have shown that the Nepalese school building stock is characterized by a high level of vulnerability with respect to seismic actions. According to different post-event reconnaissance reports, thousands of schools have been destroyed by the 2015 earthquakes, depriving the country of a fundamental social and economic asset. Within the SAFER (Seismic Safety and Resilience of Schools in Nepal) project, a specific working task is dedicated to the assessment of school structures in terms of probabilistic fragility functions. These curves will be included in a comprehensive seismic risk management framework for the Nepalese community. However, the derivation of fragilities has to be preceded by: (i) a meaningful subdivision of the total building inventory in different structural typologies, (ii) a detailed investigation about the recurrent seismic damage and failure modes of Nepalese constructions. These two aspects and their implications on th...
La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is currently 135 years into its construction, with an expected co... more La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is currently 135 years into its construction, with an expected completion date of 2026. Since its inception by Antoni Gaudi in 1882, radical analysis and design methods have been required to imagine its architectural form and understand the engineering performance of what will be, once complete, the tallest church in the world. Gaudi famously used hanging chain models to realise the catenary form of his structures, a method which pre-empted modern form-finding software and enabled him to devise an organic optimised form long before this could be achieved with computers.
A sequence of two strike-slip earthquakes occurred on April 14 and 16, 2016 in the intraplate reg... more A sequence of two strike-slip earthquakes occurred on April 14 and 16, 2016 in the intraplate region of Kyushu Island, Japan, apart from subduction zones, and caused significant damage and disruption to the Kumamoto region. The analyses of regional seismic catalog and available strong motion recordings reveal striking characteristics of the events, such as migrating seismicity, earthquake surface rupture, and major foreshock-mainshock earthquake sequences. To gain valuable lessons from the events, a UK Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT) was dispatched to Kumamoto, and earthquake damage surveys were conducted to relate observed earthquake characteristics to building and infrastructure damage caused by the earthquakes. The lessons learnt from the reconnaissance mission have important implications on current seismic design practice regarding the required seismic resistance of structures under multiple shocks and the seismic design of infrastructure subject to large ground deformation. The observations also highlight the consequences of cascading geological hazards on community resilience. To share the gathered damage data widely, geo-tagged photos are organized using Google Earth and the kmz file is made publicly available.
Following the collapse of the Rana Plaza Factory in Dhaka in 2013, which caused the death of 1,13... more Following the collapse of the Rana Plaza Factory in Dhaka in 2013, which caused the death of 1,134 people, extensive programmes of factory assessment and strengthening have been established to improve the safety of the Ready Made Garment (RMG) factories in Bangladesh. Improvement programmes have been driven by international consortia of RMG companies, the Bangladesh government, global workers’ unions and the International Labour Organisation. Work has mainly focused on gravity load risks which are associated with overloading, uncontrolled extensions, inadequate design and poor construction control, as these were key factors in the Rana Plaza collapse. However, recent research studies show that earthquake risk in Bangladesh is also very real and very high, due to a highly vulnerable building stock and moderate to high level of seismic hazard and a very high exposure level. The earthquake scenarios created for Dhaka and Chittagong predict that approximately 50% of the buildings might ...
La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is currently 135 years into its construction, with an expected co... more La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is currently 135 years into its construction, with an expected completion date of 2026. Since its inception by Antoni Gaudi in 1882, radical analysis and design methods have been required to imagine its architectural form and understand the engineering performance of what will be, once complete, the tallest church in the world. Gaudi famously used hanging chain models to realise the catenary form of his structures, a method which pre-empted modern form-finding software and enabled him to devise an organic optimised form long before this could be achieved with computers.
The last catastrophic seismic events in Nepal have shown that the Nepalese school building stock ... more The last catastrophic seismic events in Nepal have shown that the Nepalese school building stock is characterized by a high level of vulnerability with respect to seismic actions. According to different post-event reconnaissance reports, thousands of schools have been destroyed by the 2015 earthquakes, depriving the country of a fundamental social and economic asset. Within the SAFER (Seismic Safety and Resilience of Schools in Nepal) project, a specific working task is dedicated to the assessment of school structures in terms of probabilistic fragility functions. These curves will be included in a comprehensive seismic risk management framework for the Nepalese community. However, the derivation of fragilities has to be preceded by: (i) a meaningful subdivision of the total building inventory in different structural typologies, (ii) a detailed investigation about the recurrent seismic damage and failure modes of Nepalese constructions. These two aspects and their implications on th...
La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is currently 135 years into its construction, with an expected co... more La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona is currently 135 years into its construction, with an expected completion date of 2026. Since its inception by Antoni Gaudi in 1882, radical analysis and design methods have been required to imagine its architectural form and understand the engineering performance of what will be, once complete, the tallest church in the world. Gaudi famously used hanging chain models to realise the catenary form of his structures, a method which pre-empted modern form-finding software and enabled him to devise an organic optimised form long before this could be achieved with computers.
A sequence of two strike-slip earthquakes occurred on April 14 and 16, 2016 in the intraplate reg... more A sequence of two strike-slip earthquakes occurred on April 14 and 16, 2016 in the intraplate region of Kyushu Island, Japan, apart from subduction zones, and caused significant damage and disruption to the Kumamoto region. The analyses of regional seismic catalog and available strong motion recordings reveal striking characteristics of the events, such as migrating seismicity, earthquake surface rupture, and major foreshock-mainshock earthquake sequences. To gain valuable lessons from the events, a UK Earthquake Engineering Field Investigation Team (EEFIT) was dispatched to Kumamoto, and earthquake damage surveys were conducted to relate observed earthquake characteristics to building and infrastructure damage caused by the earthquakes. The lessons learnt from the reconnaissance mission have important implications on current seismic design practice regarding the required seismic resistance of structures under multiple shocks and the seismic design of infrastructure subject to large ground deformation. The observations also highlight the consequences of cascading geological hazards on community resilience. To share the gathered damage data widely, geo-tagged photos are organized using Google Earth and the kmz file is made publicly available.
Following the collapse of the Rana Plaza Factory in Dhaka in 2013, which caused the death of 1,13... more Following the collapse of the Rana Plaza Factory in Dhaka in 2013, which caused the death of 1,134 people, extensive programmes of factory assessment and strengthening have been established to improve the safety of the Ready Made Garment (RMG) factories in Bangladesh. Improvement programmes have been driven by international consortia of RMG companies, the Bangladesh government, global workers’ unions and the International Labour Organisation. Work has mainly focused on gravity load risks which are associated with overloading, uncontrolled extensions, inadequate design and poor construction control, as these were key factors in the Rana Plaza collapse. However, recent research studies show that earthquake risk in Bangladesh is also very real and very high, due to a highly vulnerable building stock and moderate to high level of seismic hazard and a very high exposure level. The earthquake scenarios created for Dhaka and Chittagong predict that approximately 50% of the buildings might ...
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