Design of new buildings for earthquake resistance Available to Purchase

Introduction The 1985 earthquake in Mexico City served as a sobering reminder of the destructive effects that earthquakes can have on well‐constructed and engineered buildings. The collapse of some 120 tall buildings in steel and reinforced concrete, many designed to a modern earthquake building code, and serious damage in several hundred more, might suggest that modern methods are powerless to prevent catastrophe in an extreme event. Less informed observers even concluded (erroneously) from the generally good performance of 18th and 19th century masonry buildings in the earthquake that we have somehow lost the art of earthquake resistant design which our fore‐fathers knew. The reasons for the selectiveness of attack and the poor performance of modern construction in the Mexico earthquake have been widely discussed (for example, Booth et al.1) and are reasonably well understood.