Help Design a Guide for Earthquake-resistant Housing
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 12.12.05
Calling all designers: Here is a competition to help put together an easy-to-understand manual for building more safely in earthquake zones, being developed as part of Architecture for Humanity's response to the October tragedy in Pakistan. Techniques for building more earthquake resistant structures are well known; explaining it to a poor rural person who is rebuilding is more difficult. The point of the competition is to convey these ideas effectively.
The major reasons for collapse were:
* 1. Lack of Building Zoning: unsuitable siting, functionality and proximity of buildings
* 2. Poor Design & Detailing: unsuitable designs and structural detailing, for example, lack of tying elements, robustness, resistance to horizontal load, movement joints.
* 3. Low Grade Materials: Poor quality materials and construction practice eg sub-standard concrete due to lack of large, smooth aggregates, low cement content and high water content resulting in an estimated less than 20% of concrete strength anticipated (crushed underfoot).
* 4. Poor site supervision & control: compromised quality, specifications non existent or not adhered lack of control resulting in inadequate structural integrity, for example, poor tying of reinforcement, no cover, no laps etc
* 5. Poor maintenance: compromised performance of structural elements and/or structural integrity as a result of the deterioration of structural elements due to inadequate maintenance
A Guide for Safer Rural Buildings
To try to minimise the likelihood of this occurring in the same way in Pakistan, a training toolkit is being developed to help reduce the vulnerability of future buildings. Part of that toolkit will be an illustrated “Guide for Safer Rural Buildings”. This competition aims to find illustrations for that guide to simply and graphically explain the most important ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ to the population. The guide is not intended to educate engineers and will not cover all situations. It is however, intended to provide principles in a similar way to the work of Fred Cuny and others for safer rural building in Pakistan and start to answer the question 'How do you make safe a poor person's house in the rural countryside?'
Competition Brief
"The competition is to provide illustrations or cartoons that graphically demonstrate the concept of the technical principles given below. Any text used in the illustrations will be translated into Urdu. The competitor must take into account the practical consequences of this in terms of how text is incorporated into the illustrations."
Competition closes January 20. for more information ::Architects for Humanity
And if you can't enter, ::Donate!!
