A photograph of members of the New Zealand USAR team examining the collapsed basement of a building in central Christchurch.
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Avonside Girls High School with the brightly painted new Library building in the background".
Abstract This study provides a simplified methodology for pre-event data collection to support a faster and more accurate seismic loss estimation. Existing pre-event data collection frameworks are reviewed. Data gathered after the Canterbury earthquake sequences are analysed to evaluate the relative importance of different sources of building damage. Conclusions drawns are used to explore new approaches to conduct pre-event building assessment.
A member of the University of Canterbury's E-Learning team, Jessica Hollis, in their new office in the James Hight building. The photographer comments, " Jess Hollis settles in to her new workspace".
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "New reconstruction where it is planned to add a new ground floor to this basement in Lichfield Street and then build the building".
The old Robertson's Bakery building, Victoria Street, Christchurch - back view
The old Robertson's Bakery building, Victoria Street, Christchurch - back view
A photograph of street art on a building in Brighton Mall.
A photograph of street art on a building in Brighton Mall.
An aerial photograph of Cathedral Square. The photograph has been captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Central city blocks bounded by Colombo Street, Hereford Street, Cashel Street and High Streets".
An aerial photograph of Cathedral Square with the sites of demolished buildings visible.
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "From Worcester Street looking north across The Press site to the Isaac Theatre Royal and the PricewaterhouseCoopers building in the distance".
Demolition of Robertson's Bakery building, Victoria Street, Christchurch. The Chandelier rescue ... Walking into work I saw the building I always wanted to buy (and run as a bookshop, perfumery, shoe shop) - the old Robertson's Bakery getting demolished. But the bigass digger gently reached into the wreckage and saved this chandelier, bringing...
The earthquake re-pair work has started on the Knox Church on Bealey Avenue, August 14, 2013 Christchurch New Zealand. While building after building is torn down in Christchurch, plans are in place to ensure as much of a 131-year-old church is retained as possible. Knox Church on Bealey Avenue suffered major damage in the February 22 earthquak...
A view across New Regent Street to several businesses. One of the building's verandahs has been propped up with steel bracing.
A photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "The construction of a new building on the corner of Colombo and Kilmore Streets".
A photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "A new building replacing a damaged and demolished historic hotel at 192 Moorhouse Avenue".
A photograph of street art on a building in New Brighton. The artwork includes the words, "We still love this place".
A new building under construction on Kilmore Street. A sign reading, 'Danger keep out' has been placed on the security fence.
A photograph of street art on the side of the Funky Pumpkin building in New Brighton. The artwork is signed 'Porta'.
Buildings subject to earthquake shaking will tend to move not only horizontally but also rotate in plan. In-plan rotation is known as “building torsion” and it may occur for a variety of reasons, including stiffness and strength eccentricity and/or torsional effects from ground motions. Methods to consider torsion in structural design standards generally involve analysis of the structure in its elastic state. This is despite the fact that the structural elements can yield, thereby significantly altering the building response and the structural element demands. If demands become too large, the structure may collapse. While a number of studies have been conducted into the behavior of structures considering inelastic building torsion, there appears to be no consensus that one method is better than another and as a result, provisions within current design standards have not adopted recent proposals in the literature. However, the Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission recently made the recommendation that provisions to account for inelastic torsional response of buildings be introduced within New Zealand building standards. Consequently, this study examines how and to what extent the torsional response due to system eccentricity may affect the seismic performance of a building and considers what a simple design method should account for. It is concluded that new methods should be simple, be applicable to both the elastic and inelastic range of response, consider bidirectional excitation and include guidance for multi-story systems.
People wait for buses at the new Bus Exchange between Lichfield and Tuam Streets. In the background is the temporary Central Library building.
A woman and her dog in the outdoor seating area of C1 Expresso's new location in the Alice in Videoland building.
Photograph captioned by BeckerFraserPhotos, "Bank of New Zealand building in Kaiapoi on the corner of Williams Street and Charles Street".
A photograph looking east down Gloucester Street from near the Manchester Street intersection. Members of the Wellington Emergency Management Office Emergency Response Team and construction workers are walking down the street. To their right is the new Press House building with many broken windows. In the foreground, the Coachman building has sustained earthquake damage to the façade. Wire fences have been placed around the building as a cordon.
A sign on the badly-damaged Knox Presbyterian Church reading, " Fresh, new beginnings. Join us 10am Sunday".
In the wake of the Canterbury earthquakes, one of the biggest threats to our heritage buildings is the risk of earthquakes and the associated drive to strengthen or demolish buildings. Can Small Town NZ balance the requirements of the EQPB legislation and economic realities of their places? The government’s priority is on safety of building occupants and citizens in the streets. However, maintaining and strengthening privately-owned heritage buildings is often cost prohibitive. Hence, heritage regulation has frequently been perceived as interfering with private property rights, especially when heritage buildings occupy a special place in the community becoming an important place for people (i.e. public benefits are larger than private). We investigate several case studies where building owners have been given green light to demolish heritage listed buildings to make way for modern developments. In two of the case studies developers provided evidence of unaffordable strengthening costs. A new trend that has emerged is a voluntary offer of contributing to an incentive fund to assist with heritage preservation of other buildings. This is a unique example where private owners offer incentives (via council controlled organisations) instead of it being purely the domain of the central or local governments.
A photograph of a chalked message on the side of a building in New Brighton. The message reads, "Cantabrians will prevail. Kia kaha!".
This thesis describes the strategies for earthquake strengthening vintage clay bricks unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings. URM buildings are well known to be vulnerable to damage from earthquake-induced lateral forces that may result in partial or full building collapse. The 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquakes are the most recent destructive natural disaster that resulted in the deaths of 185 people. The earthquake events had drawn people’s attention when URM failure and collapse caused about 39 of the fatality. Despite the poor performance of URM buildings during the 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquakes, a number of successful case study buildings were identified and their details research in-depth. In order to discover the successful seismic retrofitting techniques, two case studies of retrofitted historical buildings located in Christchurch, New Zealand i.e. Orion’s URM substations and an iconic Heritage Hotel (aka Old Government Building) was conducted by investigating and evaluating the earthquake performance of the seismic retrofitting technique applied on the buildings prior to the 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquakes and their performance after the earthquakes sequence. The second part of the research reported in this thesis was directed with the primary aim of developing a cost-effective seismic retrofitting technique with minimal interference to the vintage clay-bricks URM buildings. Two retrofitting techniques, (i) near-surface mounted steel wire rope (NSM-SWR) with further investigation on URM wallettes to get deeper understanding the URM in-plane behaviour, and (ii) FRP anchor are reported in this research thesis.
A pdf copy of a presentation delivered at Building a Better New Zealand (BBNZ 2014) Conference. The presentation examines the relationship between innovation and productivity improvement in the construction industry.