Design Contest by NASA - Earthquake resistant building

Contest?? :)

Have the building rest on a sliding surface.. (Teflon to teflon?). The building slides around during an earthquake. All lines like water, electric, drain, tel cables..are on break away connections. (Auto shutdown of water flow.) For a rough demo of the effectiveness...put a pile of icecubes on a table and then shake the table around..

Only helps with lateral movement though.

After the earthquake... The building has to be pushed back into position and all the utility lines reconnected.

For a nice visual of sliding buildings and a bit of movie trivia...I saw this in a movie...Monty Python?? Corporate pirates would sail their building (with filing cabinet canons) and would raid other buildings sea pirate style..

D from BC

You should post that to Alt.architecture. Ken

There's a building in downtown Vancouver (whose name I forget) that is built on top of two large sheets of steel with ball-bearings in between them, for this very reason.

Vancouver also has the WestCoast Transmission Tower (an office building, not a truss tower), which has a very very stout concrete post occupying the centre ~10% of the floor area. The whole building hangs off the top of this post, and doesn't reach all the way to the ground--it looks like an ice cream bar sticking straight up.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Coincidentally, I'm going to be passing by those buildings today..

D from BC

So THAT's why you want us to visit. ;-)

I remember seeing on the Discovery channel some Japanese engineering firm wrapping a building with huge sections of chicken wire, then applying concrete over that. It worked very well in earthquake simulation tests. I wonder if San Francisco will adopt that technology. ;-)

Michael

Yeah, well with--what is it, 5 active volcanoes?--within 75 miles of downtown Vancouver, it sort of concentrates the mind.

Cheers,

Phil "Also from BC" Hobbs

And the submitted plans and ideas are captured by the organizer. We know that.

Rene

Cheers! Rich

Volcano's?? :O ??? I thought it was just plates..

Worth a google search.. Found..

oh no :(

...but there's many new towers being built downtown ..???

I've experienced 2 earthquakes in BC since 1989. The last one was so small..I had to check the internet.. Was cool to see it reported online (seismic web site) within 2 hours.

D from BC

Nah. Golden Ears, Garibaldi, Whistler, Baker, and (iirc) Blackcomb are all active volcanoes, iirc. Seattle has Ranier as well.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs