Santiago Pujol

Expecting the Unexpected

While engineers have been dealing with gravity demands constantly for thousands of years, organised and systematic efforts to deal with seismic demands started roughly a century ago. Because of the stark difference between those timeframes, it should not be surprising that the history of earthquake engineering has been and will likely continue to be peppered with surprises. It is not an exaggeration to say that in earthquake engineering we must expect the unexpected. This talk revisits surprises that have shaken earthquake engineering in the distant and recent past. With that background, challenges that the profession still faces today are examined. An invitation is extended to work on those challenges through the opportunities for collaboration that Te Hiranga Rū QuakeCoRE offers us here in Aotearoa.