Buildings that “suck” less perform better in earthquakes, according to a growing global consensus

In a Taiwan warehouse, researchers pressed a button, and a five-story steel and concrete box began to shake and sway.

This is the closest researchers can get to how the type of multi-storey buildings typically built in New Zealand would behave 9,000 kilometers away in a major earthquake.

The discoveries from the work are coming now.

“You know, the partition walls, the gypsum boards that we use, the windows, the doors, even the ceilings, which we previously thought would be worse in stronger buildings, we see all these components working much better,” Santiago Pujol said.

The University of Canterbury civil engineering professor is used to spotting things – he won a top US award two years ago, looking at high-strength steel in reinforced concrete members – but the roof's performance in prototype tests in Taipei surprised him.

“Yes, that's one of the things we've discovered here recently.”

There's been some research on this before, but it wasn't systematic. Now it is.

The overall result of the New Zealand-Taiwan effort is to solidify the growing global consensus that stiffer buildings that “sway” less perform better in earthquakes – the opposite of how New Zealand built for many decades.

Moreover, they showed that it does not need to cost much, for example, only 1-2 percent of the total construction budget to make it more solid.

“You want to maximize the deformation capacity and then you want to minimize the deformation demand, if you will,” Pujol said in his engineering talk.

“In this sense we can improve things, if we make the buildings stronger, closer to what they build in Chile and Japan.”

Japan has been building this way for a century, since the Great Kanto Earthquake divided Tokyo in 1923, and Chile since the 1930s.

“You know, it takes time to understand some of these things and the professions adhere to different schools of thought.

“By now, it has become fairly clear that the consensus – the global consensus – is that we need stronger buildings.”

Santiago Pujol is Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Canterbury. Image: University of Canterbury

“We can act a little faster.”

The United States was moving in this direction, as was Turkey, as they were trying to change the building code to avoid a repeat of the 2023 earthquake that killed more than 40,000 people.

“I think we can move a little faster,” Pujol said of New Zealand. “The first thing we need to do is update our building standards to require more strength.”

He added that these conversations were already taking place with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, which oversees the building code.

“New Zealand has good building codes that protect the lives of their occupants. What we're talking about here is buildings that go beyond just life safety and try to ensure functionality again. It's a different model.”

Hospitals were an example of buildings that needed to be operated quickly after an earthquake.

Data provided to his team by Chile's Ministry of Health showed that more resilient hospitals there were performing better.

He did not know the details of the hospitals being built in New Zealand, but said he knew several local companies that were already trying to build stronger, more solid buildings.

“By that I mean buildings that drift or sway less in earthquakes, because that will reduce damage and allow us to get back to our buildings sooner after an earthquake.”

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