Abstract

Contemporary seismic design standards are rooted in the notion of collapse-prevention during major seismic events, ensuring a predictable failure mode and minimizing casualties. This prevailing design strategy leads to permanent structural deformations, astounding economic losses and disruption of businesses and social systems in the aftermath of earthquakes. In this context, allowing the buildings to uplift has been proposed as an alternative to minimize post-earthquake damage and disruption. However, for all the benefits of this innovative proposal, rocking motion can increase the building deformations and accelerations hindering its damage-avoidance capabilities. This presentation will introduce alternative configurations of rocking structures equipped with seismic control technologies that have the potential to reach a true damage-avoidance performance. The application of fundamental knowledge gained from simplified models to the practical design of typical rocking buildings is highlighted.