Effective Architecture-Seismic Design Integration in Teaching Practice: Elementary School Design - Case Study

Abstract eng:
Because of housing the most vulnerable part of any society, the children, and due to the use of school spaces and facilities as post-disaster management centers, the paramount importance of an adequate seismic design of schools is widely recognized. Such adequacy requires nevertheless the combined effort of engineers and architects, whose interests usually seem to be rather confrontational than integrated for the sake of the ultimate building safety. This issue becomes particularly notorious when teaching seismic design principles to students of architecture, as they perceive such principles as a serious limitation to their design freedom. Since architecture students learn by developing design strategies, the key for achieving successful architecture-seismic design integration is the application of a method where seismic principles are addressed as design strategies. That is, site analysis, targeted performance, and more importantly, the three-dimensional control of the building configuration by the assessment of the building stiffness distribution in each orthogonal direction. This article describes the setting of a teaching methodology addressing effective architecture-seismic design integration at a faculty of architecture in Izmir, Turkey, wherein the students were asked to design an elementary school. Since the main objective is to achieve even and regular spatial arrays of earthquake-resistant elements, the method focuses on determining the amount of stiffness in each orthogonal direction for a given configuration, in such a way that students (and architects) may modify overall dimensions of the elements during the process, to eventually produce an initial earthquake-resistant design. Hence the method addresses the assessment of the earthquake-resistant configurations not only in terms of ‘correctness’ (structural soundness), but in terms of its degree of feasible manipulation. This later feature is essential for architects as design freedom is often perceived in association with the possibility of modifying the project beyond the initial rules –wherever they come from. This effective seismic-architecture design integration is assessed against three objectives: (1) Awareness: The process of design embraces the logic of the earthquake-resistant principles and thus produces designs that are inherently safe, from both seismic and architectural point of views; (2) Suitability: The correctness of the projects is not only measured in terms of the adequate size of earthquake-resistant elements and/or torsional effects, i.e. by a quantitative assessment, but also in terms of its level of adequacy to specific community needs, aspirations, and even beliefs, i.e. by a qualitative assessment; (3) Identity: The promotion of local socio-cultural values by architecture that is been driven by seismic design principles, and thus, not only meets the performance targets determined by a specific location but promotes identity with the community wherein the building takes place. The resulting school designs suggest that, within an integrated process of seismic-architectural design, students’ seismic awareness is increased; effective earthquakeresistant building design can be developed from the early stages of the architectural design process; and, in the better cases, seismic design becomes the design driver for the entire process of producing a work of architecture.

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