The finalists for BD’s Architect of the Year Awards 2008 have been announced, with Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, BDP and John McAslan & Partners all gaining four nominations.
Maccreanor Lavington and Shedkm are nominated in two of the 14 categories, both competing with Allford Hall Monaghan Morris for Private Housing Architect of the Year (over 14 units).
The winners will be announced on October 30 at the London Hilton on Park Lane.
BD’s Architect of the Year Awards 2008 shortlist
Affordable Housing Architect of the Year
Allford Hall Monaghan Morris
Jestico & Whiles
Levitt Bernstein Associates
Maccreanor Lavington
Stock Woolstencroft
Private Housing Architect of the Year (over 14 units)
Allford Hall Monaghan Morris
Broadway Malyan
Maccreanor Lavington
Richard Murphy Architects
Shedkm
Private Housing Architect of the Year (one to 14 units)
Alison Brooks Architects
Julian Cowie Architects
Shedkm
Simon Conder Associates
Education Architect of the Year
Allford Hall Monaghan Morris
DSDHA
Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios
John McAslan & Partners
Penoyre & Prasad
Wright & Wright Architects
Healthcare Architect of the Year
BDP
Buschow Henley
David Morley Architects
Toh Shimazaki Architecture
Interiors Architect of the Year
Adjaye Associates
BDP
Bennett Interior
David Archer Architects
Pringle Brandon
Masterplanning Architect of the Year
BDP
Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios
John McAslan & Partners
Stephen Taylor Architects
Office Architect of the Year
Atkins
Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios
Make
Shedkm
Public Buildings Architect of the Year
Allford Hall Monaghan Morris
Denton Corker Marshall
Gareth Hoskins Architects
Keith Williams Architects
Marks Barfield Architects
Retail Architect of the Year
3DReid
Adjaye Associates
BDP
Foreign Office Architects
John McAslan & Partners
Sport & Leisure Architect of the Year
David Morley Architects
Dyer
EPR Architects
HOK Sport Architecture
Hopkins Architects
Transport Architect of the Year
3DReid
Grimshaw
John McAslan & Partners
Pascall & Watson Architects
Zaha Hadid Architects
Accordia wins the Stirling Prize
Accordia in Cambridge by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, Alison Brooks Architects and Maccreanor Lavington has won the 2008 Stirling Prize.
The judges commented: “This is high density housing at its very best, demonstrating that volume house-builders can deliver high quality architecture – and that as a result they can improve their own bottom line.
"The whole scheme is about relationships: between architect and developer/contractor/client; between three very different firms of architects – Feilden Clegg Bradley, Maccreanor Lavington and Alison Brooks Architects; and between private and public external spaces, providing a new model for outside-inside life with interior rooftop spaces, internal courtyards and large semi-public community gardens.”
Peter Clegg, senior partner with Feilden Clegg Bradley Architects, told BD: “I predicted all of the other winners but I couldn’t have predicted this one. What we are doing is changing the mould of housing.”
When Accordia was shortlisted, BD Buildings Editor Ellis Woodman said: “By rights, Accordia should have been on last year’s shortlist. However, when the RIBA jury visited the scheme they found that they couldn’t get access to any of the houses so decided that it couldn’t be put forward for an award. The Stirling hasn’t had a great record of recognising quality housing developments. After BedZed, Accordia is only the second housing scheme to be shortlisted in the prize’s history. However, it would make a very worthy winner.
“In a period when the housing sector has become increasingly focussed on the construction of inner-city apartments, Accordia addresses the urgent need to build quality family homes at large scale and a sustainable density.”
The judges’ choice of Accordia will certainly be of relief to the bookmakers. Going into the final day, the Cambridge housing scheme was sixth with odds of 5/1 at William Hill.
RIBA special awards
Also announced on Saturday night were the RIBA special awards:
Manser Medal for the best one-off house or housing scheme: Oxley Woods
Stephen Lawrence Prize for the best example of a building with a construction budget of less than £1 million: The Sackler Crossing in Kew by John Pawson Architects
RIBA CABE Public Space Award which celebrates publicly accessible external space: The Old Market Square, Nottingham by Gustafson Porter
Crown Estate Conservation Award, for the best work of conservation which demonstrates successful restoration or adaptation of an architecturally significant building: St. Pancras International by Alastair Lansley (for Union Railways)
RIBA Sustainability Award: The Manchester Civil Justice Centre, Manchester by Denton Corker Marshall
Sorrell Foundation Schools Award: Westminster Academy at the Naim Dangoor Centre by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris.
The judges commented: “This is high density housing at its very best, demonstrating that volume house-builders can deliver high quality architecture – and that as a result they can improve their own bottom line.
"The whole scheme is about relationships: between architect and developer/contractor/client; between three very different firms of architects – Feilden Clegg Bradley, Maccreanor Lavington and Alison Brooks Architects; and between private and public external spaces, providing a new model for outside-inside life with interior rooftop spaces, internal courtyards and large semi-public community gardens.”
Peter Clegg, senior partner with Feilden Clegg Bradley Architects, told BD: “I predicted all of the other winners but I couldn’t have predicted this one. What we are doing is changing the mould of housing.”
When Accordia was shortlisted, BD Buildings Editor Ellis Woodman said: “By rights, Accordia should have been on last year’s shortlist. However, when the RIBA jury visited the scheme they found that they couldn’t get access to any of the houses so decided that it couldn’t be put forward for an award. The Stirling hasn’t had a great record of recognising quality housing developments. After BedZed, Accordia is only the second housing scheme to be shortlisted in the prize’s history. However, it would make a very worthy winner.
“In a period when the housing sector has become increasingly focussed on the construction of inner-city apartments, Accordia addresses the urgent need to build quality family homes at large scale and a sustainable density.”
The judges’ choice of Accordia will certainly be of relief to the bookmakers. Going into the final day, the Cambridge housing scheme was sixth with odds of 5/1 at William Hill.
RIBA special awards
Also announced on Saturday night were the RIBA special awards:
Manser Medal for the best one-off house or housing scheme: Oxley Woods
Stephen Lawrence Prize for the best example of a building with a construction budget of less than £1 million: The Sackler Crossing in Kew by John Pawson Architects
RIBA CABE Public Space Award which celebrates publicly accessible external space: The Old Market Square, Nottingham by Gustafson Porter
Crown Estate Conservation Award, for the best work of conservation which demonstrates successful restoration or adaptation of an architecturally significant building: St. Pancras International by Alastair Lansley (for Union Railways)
RIBA Sustainability Award: The Manchester Civil Justice Centre, Manchester by Denton Corker Marshall
Sorrell Foundation Schools Award: Westminster Academy at the Naim Dangoor Centre by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris.
The Oval Tower, Another Landmark For Dubai
The Oval Tower is the latest piece of architectural whimsy to come out of Dubai. As you might guess, it is shaped like an oval. The tower in the Business Bay area will be home to 19 floors of office space and a leisure deck with a gymnasium with a sauna, shower and lockers.
The building as two distinct parts, the tower and the podium. The podium of the tower will hold a dining area with a panoramic lift and staircase. There will be parking in both the podium and the basement for 651 cars.
The building as two distinct parts, the tower and the podium. The podium of the tower will hold a dining area with a panoramic lift and staircase. There will be parking in both the podium and the basement for 651 cars.
A canvas in concrete: Architecture as Art?
His bare apartment blocks and austere interiors transformed 20th-century architecture. But could Le Corbusier's forms be called art?
Le Corbusier was, arguably, the most influential architect of the 20th century. Every time you walk past the Barbican, you're in Corbusier territory; the same applies if you explore the ruins of the extraordinary seminary at Cardross designed by Gillespie Kidd & Coia, or if you happened to be strolling through the Sussex University campus designed by Sir Basil Spence. Should you travel on a Virgin Pendolino to Liverpool, where the first major British exhibition on Corbusier's work for 20 years is underway, you will pass through a tranche of post-Corbusian urban planning known as Runcorn.
More than three decades after drowning while swimming off the coast of the Côte d'Azur, Corbusier's importance makes him almost impossible to discuss, or view, without lurching into prejudice. He saw the future and designed it decades before anybody else. Correction: he tainted the future with the allure of concrete, and surfaces stripped of texture or decoration. His designs proposed a sensually socialist world. No, he was an utter solipsist who wanted very little to do with people who weren't as over-dressed, bourgeois, creative and mother-fixated as he.
Le Corbusier, The Art of Architecture is embedded in the crypt of Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. And there's a nice conceit to this: the launch-pad architecture of the so-called Paddy's Wigwam was designed in the Sixties by a Corbusian, Sir Frederick Gibberd, but rose from a crypt designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1931 as the foundation of a cathedral that would have been as big as St Peter's in Rome. Under those beautifully bricked vaults, in a show sponsored by the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Vitra Design Museum, should we bury architecture's Caesar – along with those heavy, circular spectacle frames that said: I see things you don't – or praise him?
The futuristic form of Saint-Pierre de Firminy church, built in 1960
The first thing to say about the exhibition, created by Graeme Russell, is that it has been arranged with considerable virtuosity. Russell, working with Dieter Theil, has deferred with some grace to Lutyens' marvellous spaces, yet managed to create thoroughly modernist sets: the tableaux and linked perspectives are precisely set out, and we are drawn through the show by subtle glimpses ahead at key points.
Perspectives relating to the fountainheads, and riddles, of Corbusier's art and architecture are less certainly portrayed. The genius of the Swiss architect is certainly apparent, but not in an obviously progressive narrative; we don't quite get to the root of his obsessions. Nor is there any subtext of humanity, or of humane architectural commodity. Corbusier's conflations of art and architecture are mostly presented as a kind of orderly collage or scenography in which time, or the critical moment, seems absent. The material in the three sections of the exhibition – Context, Privacy and Publicity, Built Art – often seem interchangeable. In this, the show reminds us just how brilliantly seductive, and ultimately ungraspable, Corbusier could be. "I am an acrobat of form, creator of form, player with form," he declared in 1951. "Form means to express all plastic emotion. Form, expression and style of mind." Architecture, he said, was "a pure creation of the mind".
Today, in an age of styled minds, and sanctified immateriality, the very idea of purity or formal playthings seems as museum-worthy as a Bakelite telephone. Corbusier still matters – not so much as an architect, but as an engrossing case-study of a designer who began by referring to houses as machines for living in (Huxley saw through that clinical nonsense in his 1932 satire on modernism, Brave New World), and ended in the thrall of primitive abstract art, not to mention breasts (drawn, on collected postcards, carved, concretised).
Most architects, even arch-modernists, think of themselves as artistic. They are not, but they want to be; a drawing board, computer screen or the now -virtually unused Rotring pen are ultimately Nanny Whips, rather than naked models. Corbusier was the first of the post-Bauhaus massive to bring arbitrary abstraction, and the body's sensuality, into major architectural works, and tens of thousands of ordinary architects have since tucked into that vaguely sexy design slipstream with no intention of pursuing the profound creative conflicts and risks that generate the best architecture.
The risk is that we should think of Corbusier's art and architecture as interchangeable. Fortunately, the exhibition demonstrates only juxtapositions between his art and architecture, rather than fusions. Architecture, however artful, is almost always extruded through a conflicting mesh of imagination, rationality, cost and functional imperatives. If you are Zaha Hadid, you will have clients who can pay for a vast sculpture in the Emirates that might also happen to be a concert hall; if you are Jacques Herzog or Rem Koolhaas, you can deploy outlandish amounts of steel to create a stadium or a state television headquarters in Beijing whose forms are perceived as being in some way artistic. But the art-response is mendacious and activates a pernicious trip-wire: architecture plus art equals entertainment; entertainment is fleeting, therefore architecture is fleeting and we needn't trouble ourselves to think too deeply about it.
Corbusier thought deeply about architecture – even the Edwardian Lutyens, who disliked his architecture, recognised this – and he designed and built for posterity. Even his models were built to last. The massive wooden model showing the artfully symbolised topography and buildings of the government site in Chandigarh, India, is utterly engrossing; its undulations and objects form a richly surreal tableau, a dreamscape rather than an architectural setting. In the mind of Corbusier, reality always follows dream.
Or almost always. The illustration of Corbusier's Plan Obus, a 1931 scheme that would have demolished two-thirds of Algiers' kasbah to make way for a continuous serpentine apartment block hundreds of feet high, several miles long, with a motorway on top of it, could be described as a "plasticised" primitive relief. In this case, art threatened architecture: a wonderfully revealing perspective drawing shows a single man standing on a narrow central walkway between the two lines of traffic, with the Gulf of Algiers far below. In one image, we see the brilliance and potential vacuity of Corbusier as the artist of a floating, ferroconcrete world that mostly wanted very little to do with the ground (messy) or people (ditto), and vastly more to do with cars and aeroplanes and houses such as the seminal Villa Savoye (which hardly touched the ground). The exhibition succeeds admirably in showing facets of this eternally debatable aspect of his architecture.
Obus means bombshell in French. Graeme Russell's exhibition has given us the shell fragments of Corbusier's architectural impacts, but not the tensions that underlay them. We encounter much that is of interest: films, models, carving, letters, magazines, fly-through visuals; and all of it set out to suggest fairly distinct connections between his art and architecture. Yet what really matters (and the exhibition avoids this important provocation) are the dynamics of their estrangements. The show proves, unintentionally, that Le Corbusier was – and in no small way – a great architect because he was a minor artist.
Le Corbusier was, arguably, the most influential architect of the 20th century. Every time you walk past the Barbican, you're in Corbusier territory; the same applies if you explore the ruins of the extraordinary seminary at Cardross designed by Gillespie Kidd & Coia, or if you happened to be strolling through the Sussex University campus designed by Sir Basil Spence. Should you travel on a Virgin Pendolino to Liverpool, where the first major British exhibition on Corbusier's work for 20 years is underway, you will pass through a tranche of post-Corbusian urban planning known as Runcorn.
More than three decades after drowning while swimming off the coast of the Côte d'Azur, Corbusier's importance makes him almost impossible to discuss, or view, without lurching into prejudice. He saw the future and designed it decades before anybody else. Correction: he tainted the future with the allure of concrete, and surfaces stripped of texture or decoration. His designs proposed a sensually socialist world. No, he was an utter solipsist who wanted very little to do with people who weren't as over-dressed, bourgeois, creative and mother-fixated as he.
Le Corbusier, The Art of Architecture is embedded in the crypt of Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. And there's a nice conceit to this: the launch-pad architecture of the so-called Paddy's Wigwam was designed in the Sixties by a Corbusian, Sir Frederick Gibberd, but rose from a crypt designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1931 as the foundation of a cathedral that would have been as big as St Peter's in Rome. Under those beautifully bricked vaults, in a show sponsored by the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Vitra Design Museum, should we bury architecture's Caesar – along with those heavy, circular spectacle frames that said: I see things you don't – or praise him?
The futuristic form of Saint-Pierre de Firminy church, built in 1960
The first thing to say about the exhibition, created by Graeme Russell, is that it has been arranged with considerable virtuosity. Russell, working with Dieter Theil, has deferred with some grace to Lutyens' marvellous spaces, yet managed to create thoroughly modernist sets: the tableaux and linked perspectives are precisely set out, and we are drawn through the show by subtle glimpses ahead at key points.
Perspectives relating to the fountainheads, and riddles, of Corbusier's art and architecture are less certainly portrayed. The genius of the Swiss architect is certainly apparent, but not in an obviously progressive narrative; we don't quite get to the root of his obsessions. Nor is there any subtext of humanity, or of humane architectural commodity. Corbusier's conflations of art and architecture are mostly presented as a kind of orderly collage or scenography in which time, or the critical moment, seems absent. The material in the three sections of the exhibition – Context, Privacy and Publicity, Built Art – often seem interchangeable. In this, the show reminds us just how brilliantly seductive, and ultimately ungraspable, Corbusier could be. "I am an acrobat of form, creator of form, player with form," he declared in 1951. "Form means to express all plastic emotion. Form, expression and style of mind." Architecture, he said, was "a pure creation of the mind".
Today, in an age of styled minds, and sanctified immateriality, the very idea of purity or formal playthings seems as museum-worthy as a Bakelite telephone. Corbusier still matters – not so much as an architect, but as an engrossing case-study of a designer who began by referring to houses as machines for living in (Huxley saw through that clinical nonsense in his 1932 satire on modernism, Brave New World), and ended in the thrall of primitive abstract art, not to mention breasts (drawn, on collected postcards, carved, concretised).
Most architects, even arch-modernists, think of themselves as artistic. They are not, but they want to be; a drawing board, computer screen or the now -virtually unused Rotring pen are ultimately Nanny Whips, rather than naked models. Corbusier was the first of the post-Bauhaus massive to bring arbitrary abstraction, and the body's sensuality, into major architectural works, and tens of thousands of ordinary architects have since tucked into that vaguely sexy design slipstream with no intention of pursuing the profound creative conflicts and risks that generate the best architecture.
The risk is that we should think of Corbusier's art and architecture as interchangeable. Fortunately, the exhibition demonstrates only juxtapositions between his art and architecture, rather than fusions. Architecture, however artful, is almost always extruded through a conflicting mesh of imagination, rationality, cost and functional imperatives. If you are Zaha Hadid, you will have clients who can pay for a vast sculpture in the Emirates that might also happen to be a concert hall; if you are Jacques Herzog or Rem Koolhaas, you can deploy outlandish amounts of steel to create a stadium or a state television headquarters in Beijing whose forms are perceived as being in some way artistic. But the art-response is mendacious and activates a pernicious trip-wire: architecture plus art equals entertainment; entertainment is fleeting, therefore architecture is fleeting and we needn't trouble ourselves to think too deeply about it.
Corbusier thought deeply about architecture – even the Edwardian Lutyens, who disliked his architecture, recognised this – and he designed and built for posterity. Even his models were built to last. The massive wooden model showing the artfully symbolised topography and buildings of the government site in Chandigarh, India, is utterly engrossing; its undulations and objects form a richly surreal tableau, a dreamscape rather than an architectural setting. In the mind of Corbusier, reality always follows dream.
Or almost always. The illustration of Corbusier's Plan Obus, a 1931 scheme that would have demolished two-thirds of Algiers' kasbah to make way for a continuous serpentine apartment block hundreds of feet high, several miles long, with a motorway on top of it, could be described as a "plasticised" primitive relief. In this case, art threatened architecture: a wonderfully revealing perspective drawing shows a single man standing on a narrow central walkway between the two lines of traffic, with the Gulf of Algiers far below. In one image, we see the brilliance and potential vacuity of Corbusier as the artist of a floating, ferroconcrete world that mostly wanted very little to do with the ground (messy) or people (ditto), and vastly more to do with cars and aeroplanes and houses such as the seminal Villa Savoye (which hardly touched the ground). The exhibition succeeds admirably in showing facets of this eternally debatable aspect of his architecture.
Obus means bombshell in French. Graeme Russell's exhibition has given us the shell fragments of Corbusier's architectural impacts, but not the tensions that underlay them. We encounter much that is of interest: films, models, carving, letters, magazines, fly-through visuals; and all of it set out to suggest fairly distinct connections between his art and architecture. Yet what really matters (and the exhibition avoids this important provocation) are the dynamics of their estrangements. The show proves, unintentionally, that Le Corbusier was – and in no small way – a great architect because he was a minor artist.
Backen Gillam Architects
Howard J. Backen cautions against believing the stereotype. “It’s a misconception,” he says, “that an architect’s ego should overwhelm the work. In actual practice, a vital part of any successful project is the collaborative architect-client relationship.”
Northern California-based Backen Gillam Architects (a 40-person firm he leads with his partner, James Gillam) adheres to a design philosophy based on siting a building in harmony with nature and in accordance with the client’s goals.
“I’m interested only in making happen what a particular project wants to happen. I take all the factors involved—the clients’ thoughts and living patterns, site, location, budget—and they tell me what to do. There are no preconceived notions.”
Northern California-based Backen Gillam Architects (a 40-person firm he leads with his partner, James Gillam) adheres to a design philosophy based on siting a building in harmony with nature and in accordance with the client’s goals.
“I’m interested only in making happen what a particular project wants to happen. I take all the factors involved—the clients’ thoughts and living patterns, site, location, budget—and they tell me what to do. There are no preconceived notions.”
Coop Himmelb(l)au - BMW's Delivery Centre
Coop Himmelb(l)au’s BMW delivery center in Munich is, marvels Giovannini, “a huge building supported by a funneling column that looks like a tornado. It rivals the Guggenheim in Bilbao in sheer spectacle and intelligence.”
Wooden Inspiration : Ocho House
For those wooden furnishings fans out there, I have something for you. The Ocho House in the Santa Lucia Mountains, California, doesn’t look like a lodge but thanks to its extremely cozy arrangements it does make you feel like living in one.
The interior seems large because of the large windows and the tall ceilings, but comfortable at the same time thanks to the materials and colors used : butter beige, white, natural wood, dark brown and black.
What I like most? The wooden staircases, the huge door and the living room view down the valley. You?
But more than the wooden inspiration this is a highly sustainable house that uses overhanging green walls and a smart solar roof. That’s the reason it got the green Energy and Sustainability Honor award from the American Institute of Architects.
Ancient Indian buildings, Earth Quakeproof
Researchers believe that ancient buildings in India's northern Uttarkashi district have been built to resist devastating earthquakes.
Studies showed that the Koti Banal architecture - named after a village in the district - relied on stone-filled solid platforms and careful use of wood, The Telegraph reported.
The ancient four-storey and five-story buildings have survived the 1720 Kumaon earthquake and the 1803 Garhwal earthquake, both of which had destroyed buildings in the region.
“This earthquake-safe architecture may have evolved after an earthquake that occurred around BC 1100, which was particularly devastating,” said A. Srivastava, a scientist at the Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleobotany, Lucknow.
Dating back to about 880 years ago, the buildings have a solid platform at the base, wooden beams, and walls and floors covered with wood panels.
Engineers believe the wood-based structures are more flexible than other material, giving it the ability to absorb and dissipate energy and therefore reduce the risk of collapse.
“Surviving specimens of Koti Banal architecture need to be protected as heritage buildings,” said heritage
Studies showed that the Koti Banal architecture - named after a village in the district - relied on stone-filled solid platforms and careful use of wood, The Telegraph reported.
The ancient four-storey and five-story buildings have survived the 1720 Kumaon earthquake and the 1803 Garhwal earthquake, both of which had destroyed buildings in the region.
“This earthquake-safe architecture may have evolved after an earthquake that occurred around BC 1100, which was particularly devastating,” said A. Srivastava, a scientist at the Birbal Sahni Institute of Paleobotany, Lucknow.
Dating back to about 880 years ago, the buildings have a solid platform at the base, wooden beams, and walls and floors covered with wood panels.
Engineers believe the wood-based structures are more flexible than other material, giving it the ability to absorb and dissipate energy and therefore reduce the risk of collapse.
“Surviving specimens of Koti Banal architecture need to be protected as heritage buildings,” said heritage
Tips for quake-resistant buildings
The Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India, has issued amended bylaws for the Delhi area to ensure the coming up of earthquake-resistant buildings. The incorporation of safety measures will be the responsibility of owners.
The amended bylaws are to serve as the model for the states which have been directed to enact similar bylaws. It has been made mandatory to provide a certificate along with building plans and an undertaking that the plans submitted for approval "satisfy the requirements as stipulated by the NBC (National Building Code).
The certificate, as also the building plans, will have to carry the signatures of the building owner, the architect and that of a structural engineer. A similar certificate will have to be furnished at the time of obtaining the completion certificate for the building that it has been built strictly according to the plans and design approved.
So, a person desiring to build a house will have to be fully aware as to what constitutes a safe design for an earthquake-resistant building. This write-up is an attempt to list the common pitfalls which make a building vulnerable to earthquakes.
An interesting publication on the subject has been brought out by the Indian Standards Institute (renamed the Bureau of Indian Standards), New Delhi, entitled "Earthquake-Resistant Design and Construction of Buildings". Several expert agencies have worked together in bringing out this book. The various recommendations listed in it have been verified experimentally on models tested on the "shake-tables tests".
The earthquake force imparted to a building is a function of mass. So, the building should be designed as light as possible, consistent with structural safety and functional requirements. Thus the roof and the upper storeys of the building in particular should be designed in this manner. The different components of the building should be tied together in such a manner that it acts as one unit. The concrete slabs should be rigidly connected or integrally cast with the support beams.
Additions and alterations to the building should be accompanied by the provisions of "separation" of the "crumple" section between the new and the existing structure.
Cantilever or projected parts should be avoided as far as possible. But where necessary such a construction should be properly reinforced and fully tied to the main structure and adequately designed. A prefabricated construction has been found, after the American earthquake of 1988, to be prone to collapse due to the post-tremor impact.
Ceiling plaster should be avoided as far as possible, but where necessary, such a plaster should be kept as thin as possible. Suspended ceiling should not be provided as such a construction is most prone to falling down during tremors. Where provided, suspended ceiling sections should be adequately framed and secured.
In order to minimise "torsion and stress concentration", a building should have a simple rectangular plan, and should be symmetrical, both with respect to the mass and the rigidity of the structure. The length of the rectangular section should be kept not more than three times its width.
The centre of rigidity is defined as the point where a lateral force, if applied, would produce equal deflections of its components as at any one level in any particular direction.
If the symmetry of the structure is not possible in the plan, elevation or the mass, provision should made for torsion and other effects due to an earthquake in the structural design, or parts of different rigidities should be "separated through the crumple section".
No structure should be founded on loose soil (such as fine sand, silt). In case loose fine soil or expansive clay soil cannot be avoided, we should either provide a "raft foundation" or a "pile foundation" with the piles transferring the load to the firm soil. The other option available is the "foundation improvement" by either "sand piling" or by "vibro-compaction" of the loose soil.
All the "individual footings", or the "pile caps" where adopted in soft soil, should be connected by reinforced concrete ties extending in at least two directions at right angles to each other.
For buildings with a basement, the ties be placed at the level of the basement floor. These ties should be designed to carry the load of the panel walls also if located on them.
Such ties will not be needed where the structural floor connects the columns at or below the plinth level. These ties should be designed to "tension" and "compression" loads, in addition to the axial load not less than the earthquake force acting on the heaviest column connected. While working out the "buckling strength" of the ties, the lateral support provided by the soil should be taken into account.
Where necessary a complete separation of different parts of the building should be made except below the plinth level.
The foundations have to be equipped to face the lateral force whose magnitude may be found from the "design seismic coefficient" or from dynamic model tests on shaking-tables.
It may be mentioned that the commonly adopted individual footings have virtually no strength to meet the lateral forces. But if the individual footings are tied together with structural members of adequate strength to transmit tension or compression forces, from one footing to the group, the chances of survival increase.
Basement walls provide a "thrust area" which reduces the lateral force required to be carried by the foundations. Raft foundations located on the well-compacted soil require less rigid lateral support to ensure greater "damping" and absorb a greater amount of energy.
Doors and windows in the walls reduce their lateral load resistance and hence these should preferably be small and centrally located. The top of all openings in any one storey should be at the same level so that a continuous band is provided.
Band of reinforced concrete or reinforced brick work, provided in the walls is to tie together and to impart horizontal bending strength, which is a desirable feature against earthquake forces. One such band should be located near the plinth level and other just below the roof. Such bands provide the overall integrity of the building so that all the walls act simultaneously together under the earthquake force which then get distributed on the walls.
The bands at the plinth level, the lintel level and the roof level should be joined by the vertical steel (MS bar of 12 mm diametre for a single-storey house, and an 18 mm bar located at the junction of the walls is considered adequate.
The amended bylaws are to serve as the model for the states which have been directed to enact similar bylaws. It has been made mandatory to provide a certificate along with building plans and an undertaking that the plans submitted for approval "satisfy the requirements as stipulated by the NBC (National Building Code).
The certificate, as also the building plans, will have to carry the signatures of the building owner, the architect and that of a structural engineer. A similar certificate will have to be furnished at the time of obtaining the completion certificate for the building that it has been built strictly according to the plans and design approved.
So, a person desiring to build a house will have to be fully aware as to what constitutes a safe design for an earthquake-resistant building. This write-up is an attempt to list the common pitfalls which make a building vulnerable to earthquakes.
An interesting publication on the subject has been brought out by the Indian Standards Institute (renamed the Bureau of Indian Standards), New Delhi, entitled "Earthquake-Resistant Design and Construction of Buildings". Several expert agencies have worked together in bringing out this book. The various recommendations listed in it have been verified experimentally on models tested on the "shake-tables tests".
The earthquake force imparted to a building is a function of mass. So, the building should be designed as light as possible, consistent with structural safety and functional requirements. Thus the roof and the upper storeys of the building in particular should be designed in this manner. The different components of the building should be tied together in such a manner that it acts as one unit. The concrete slabs should be rigidly connected or integrally cast with the support beams.
Additions and alterations to the building should be accompanied by the provisions of "separation" of the "crumple" section between the new and the existing structure.
Cantilever or projected parts should be avoided as far as possible. But where necessary such a construction should be properly reinforced and fully tied to the main structure and adequately designed. A prefabricated construction has been found, after the American earthquake of 1988, to be prone to collapse due to the post-tremor impact.
Ceiling plaster should be avoided as far as possible, but where necessary, such a plaster should be kept as thin as possible. Suspended ceiling should not be provided as such a construction is most prone to falling down during tremors. Where provided, suspended ceiling sections should be adequately framed and secured.
In order to minimise "torsion and stress concentration", a building should have a simple rectangular plan, and should be symmetrical, both with respect to the mass and the rigidity of the structure. The length of the rectangular section should be kept not more than three times its width.
The centre of rigidity is defined as the point where a lateral force, if applied, would produce equal deflections of its components as at any one level in any particular direction.
If the symmetry of the structure is not possible in the plan, elevation or the mass, provision should made for torsion and other effects due to an earthquake in the structural design, or parts of different rigidities should be "separated through the crumple section".
No structure should be founded on loose soil (such as fine sand, silt). In case loose fine soil or expansive clay soil cannot be avoided, we should either provide a "raft foundation" or a "pile foundation" with the piles transferring the load to the firm soil. The other option available is the "foundation improvement" by either "sand piling" or by "vibro-compaction" of the loose soil.
All the "individual footings", or the "pile caps" where adopted in soft soil, should be connected by reinforced concrete ties extending in at least two directions at right angles to each other.
For buildings with a basement, the ties be placed at the level of the basement floor. These ties should be designed to carry the load of the panel walls also if located on them.
Such ties will not be needed where the structural floor connects the columns at or below the plinth level. These ties should be designed to "tension" and "compression" loads, in addition to the axial load not less than the earthquake force acting on the heaviest column connected. While working out the "buckling strength" of the ties, the lateral support provided by the soil should be taken into account.
Where necessary a complete separation of different parts of the building should be made except below the plinth level.
The foundations have to be equipped to face the lateral force whose magnitude may be found from the "design seismic coefficient" or from dynamic model tests on shaking-tables.
It may be mentioned that the commonly adopted individual footings have virtually no strength to meet the lateral forces. But if the individual footings are tied together with structural members of adequate strength to transmit tension or compression forces, from one footing to the group, the chances of survival increase.
Basement walls provide a "thrust area" which reduces the lateral force required to be carried by the foundations. Raft foundations located on the well-compacted soil require less rigid lateral support to ensure greater "damping" and absorb a greater amount of energy.
Doors and windows in the walls reduce their lateral load resistance and hence these should preferably be small and centrally located. The top of all openings in any one storey should be at the same level so that a continuous band is provided.
Band of reinforced concrete or reinforced brick work, provided in the walls is to tie together and to impart horizontal bending strength, which is a desirable feature against earthquake forces. One such band should be located near the plinth level and other just below the roof. Such bands provide the overall integrity of the building so that all the walls act simultaneously together under the earthquake force which then get distributed on the walls.
The bands at the plinth level, the lintel level and the roof level should be joined by the vertical steel (MS bar of 12 mm diametre for a single-storey house, and an 18 mm bar located at the junction of the walls is considered adequate.
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