A zip file of an interactive 360-degree panoramic photograph in HTML5 format. The photograph was taken at the western intersection of Cathedral Square and Worcester Street on 1 June 2014.
A zip file of an interactive 360-degree panoramic photograph in SWF format. The photograph was taken at the western intersection of Cathedral Square and Worcester Street on 1 June 2014.
During the Christchurch earthquake of February 2011, several midrise reinforced concrete masonry (RCM) buildings showed performance levels that fall in the range of life safety to near collapse. A case study of one of these buildings, a six-story RCM building deemed to have reached the near collapse performance level, is presented in this paper. The RCM walls on the second floor failed due to toe crushing, reducing the building's lateral resistance in the east–west direction. A three-dimensional (3-D) nonlinear dynamic analysis was conducted to simulate the development of the governing failure mechanism. Analysis results showed that the walls that were damaged were subjected to large compression loads during the earthquake, which caused an increase in their in-plane lateral strength but reduced their ductility capacity. After toe crushing failure, axial instability of the model was prevented by a redistribution of gravity loads. VoR - Version of Record