Seismic design for Boston
Design, structural analysis, and simulation of an earthquake-proof high-rise, together with an interdisciplinary team of civil engineering and architecture undergraduates.
In response to the annual Seismic Design Competition’s prompt for an earthquake-resistant high-rise set in Boston, this proposal substitutes traditional masonry with lightweight bricks supported by a steel interior structure, so as to transcend the height and seismic limitations of conventional red-brick buildings while retaining the ubiquitous materiality of New England architecture.

With a highly symmetrical floor plan that provides consistent performance against loads in all directions, the building is augmented by multi-story bracing to facilitate load transfer from the superstructure to the foundation, as well as shear walls to provideextra torsion resistance at the base.
The team’s modeling of the building’s structural behaviour using finite element analysis software SAP2000 proved to be accurate, as the balsa wood model of the building survived shaking table simulations of extreme earthquakes of magnitude 9 on the Richter scale.



Awarded: Earthquake Engineering Research Institute 2015 Seismic Design Competition Finalist