Plenary 1: Resilient Buildings

How do Kiwis in the 2020s want buildings to perform during and after an earthquake? And how could or should our current design standards and approaches change to meet these expectations? This plenary provides an update on the Resilient Buildings Project and our efforts to create a building performance framework  that reflects societal expectations. It also offers an opportunity to contribute your ideas for next steps in the project.

The Resilient Buildings Project, a NZSEE initiative, was conceived to rethink the framework behind New Zealand’s earthquake standards and design approach and lay the groundwork for buildings that meet societal expectations. The project was conceived to stretch the boundaries and reveal options for future seismic performance outcomes.

Research was completed in 2021 and early 2022 to gain a snapshot of societal preferences.  This found:

• Safety is non-negotiable.
• People are expecting more from buildings than that they just stay up after earthquakes, avoiding killing or injuring people. Social and economic recovery are also important objectives.
• Speed of recovery is a particular priority for some building types (e.g., marae, community centres, homes) which are currently not prioritised.
• The appetite for risk and expectations of buildings’ seismic performance varies significantly among those survey.

More recently the project has been focussed on developing a framework to describe impact outcomes across dimensions of building performance and interpreting the societal expectations research to determine intolerable/ tolerable impacts and countervailing performance objectives.