A view down Victoria Street from the corner of Victoria Street and Bealey Avenue. On the left is the damaged Knox Church, where the brick has crumbled but the wooden roof frame is still intact. Behind is the the BDO building and on the left is an empty demolition site.
A photograph of a member of the Diabetes Centre team in one of the rooms in the Diabetes Centre. The panelling has been removed from the wall behind, exposing the wooden frame underneath. In the foreground, a tarpaulin has been used to wall off the furniture from the rest of the room. The tarpaulin has partly fallen.
Large cracks run through the brick cladding of this house in Wainoni. The photographer comments, "During the numerous earthquakes in Christchurch the land which ran alongside the Avon river on Avonside Drive slumped towards the waterway. Houses which were wooden framed and had an external brick veneer started to sink into the liquefied soil. This caused the brick walls to crack, but the houses' occupants though shook up were saved by the wooden framework from the houses collapsing on them".
one of Christchurch's abandoned suburbs. The land moved - bricks and block walls everywhere collapsed - two multi story buildings folded - 184 people died. Wooden framed houses largely stayed up, many concrete slabs cracked, power poles leaned in liquid ground, surface bubbled, services ruptured .... damage to the cbd still gets the most cover...
Damage to a house in Richmond. Bricks have fallen from the walls onto the driveway, and a large gap between the concrete foundation and the wooden framing shows how much the house has moved. The photographer comments, "The foundations and brick cladding moved, but the timber wall remained in position. The gap grew to over 400mm by the time the house was demolished.
A photograph of the earthquake damage to Knox Church on the corner of Bealey Avenue and Victoria Street. The brick walls of the gables have collapsed, exposing the building's wooden frame and the inside of the building. Wire fences and emergency tape have been placed around the building as a cordon.
The damaged Knox Church on Bealey Avenue. The brick walls have collapsed, exposing the wooden structure beneath. The photographer comments, "Bealey Avenue is open to traffic, as are many of the side streets, and the damage to buildings along this street is quite impressive and perhaps just a small taste of the damage that lies beyond the cordon ... At the Hagley Park end of Bealey Avenue lies the Knox Church. This church suffered in the first earthquake and featured in the news a fair bit at the time. It's crazy to think that all that appeared to be damaged then were some bricks that had fallen from near the roof. Now, Knox Church is all but a wooden frame holding up a roof. It's eerie to drive past this large church and be able to look straight through it to trees on the other side".
A stack of wooden frames with the words "Quake makes world headlines" written on the uppermost frame. The photographer comments, "This is a sculpture at the CPIT facility in Christchurch. It is a series of squares placed over a column with writing on the squares. It is an excellent movable sculpture that conveys the Christchurch earthquake very well. The squares are placed so that they can slide over each other and even fall inside the other on one side. It is a pity that only two sides of the squares are written on".
In recent years, rocking isolation has become an effective approach to improve seismic performance of steel and reinforced concrete structures. These systems can mitigate structural damage through rigid body displacement and thus relatively low requirements for structural ductility, which can significantly improve seismic resilience of structures and reduce repairing costs after strong earthquakes. A number of base rocking structural systems with only a single rocking interface have been proposed. However, these systems can have significant high mode effect for high rise structures due to the single rocking interface. This RObust BUilding SysTem (ROBUST) project is a collaborative China-New Zealand project sponsored by the International Joint Research Laboratory of Earthquake Engineering (ILEE), Tongji University, and a number of agencies and universities within New Zealand including the BRANZ, Comflor, Earthquake Commission, HERA, QuakeCoRE, QuakeCentre, University of Auckland, and the University of Canterbury. A number of structural configurations will be tested [1, 2], and non-structural elements including ceilings, infilling walls, glazed curtain walls, precast concrete panels, piping system will also be tested in this project [3]. Within this study, a multiple rocking column steel structural system was proposed and investigated mainly by Tongji team with assistance of NZ members. The concept of rocking column system initiates from the structure of Chinese ancient wooden pagoda. In some of Chinese wooden pagodas, there are continuous core columns hanged only at the top of each pagoda, which is not connected to each stories. This core column can effectively avoid collapse of the whole structure under large storey drifts. Likewise, there are also central continuous columns in the newly proposed steel rocking column system, which can avoid weak story failure mechanism and make story drifts more uniform. In the proposed rocking column system, the structure can switch between an elastic rigidly connected moment resisting frame and a controlled rocking column system when subjected to strong ground motion excitations. The main seismic energy can be dissipated by asymmetric friction beam–column connections, thereby effectively reducing residual displacement of the structure under seismic loading without causing excessive damage to structural members. Re–centering of the structure is provided not only by gravity load carried by rocking columns, but also by mould coil springs. To investigate dynamic properties of the proposed system under different levels of ground excitations, a full-scale threestory steel rocking column structural system with central continuous columns is to be tested using the International joint research Laboratory of Earthquake Engineering (ILEE) facilities, Shanghai, China and an analytical model is established. A finite element model is also developed using ABAQUS to simulate the structural dynamic responses. The rocking column system proposed in this paper is shown to produce resilient design with quick repair or replacement.