Designing for Earthquakes

Course Description:

Although earthquakes cannot be prevented, modern science and engineering provide tools that, if properly used, can greatly reduce their impacts. Science can now identify, with considerable accuracy, where earthquakes are likely to occur and what forces they will generate. Good seismic engineering can provide structures that can survive to a useful degree of predictability. This course will go into these concepts in much more detail.

Learning Objectives:

Upon successful completion of this course, participants will be able to:

• Learn about the selection and assessment of sites in earthquake hazard areas.
• Be able to explain the basic ways in which earthquake-induced ground motion affects buildings.
• Learn about the development of earthquake resistant-design in the twentieth century.
• Understand the ways in which fundamental architectural design decisions influence building seismic performance, and shows how the building becomes more prone to failure and less predictable as the building becomes more complex in its overall configuration and detailed execution.
• Understand the characteristics of earthquakes that are important for building design and the nature of seismic hazard and how it is expressed.