Tall Building Initiative Signs Contract with CSSC and CalEMA for Research Project
The Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER) signed research contracts with the California Seismic Safety Commission (CSSC) and California Emergency Management Agency (CalEMA) to investigate and quantify seismic performances of tall buildings in California. This initiates a new task as part of the PEER Tall Buildings Initiative.
The task seeks to identify the benefits and costs of designing tall buildings to alternative performance levels, and aims to provide data that will help code writers and local jurisdictions address the question of whether alternative performance objectives are appropriate and cost-beneficial for tall buildings. In this new project, practitioners with experience in tall building seismic design will develop conceptual designs of three different tall buildings, each designed by three different design procedures with different performance objectives, for a total of nine designs. PEER researchers at UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, and UCLA will analyze these design variations to quantify construction costs, seismic performances, and post-earthquake capital and downtime losses. The project is funded jointly by the CSSC, CalEMA and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Preliminary results will be presented to the community through a public workshop. For more information, please contact PEER at: peer_center@berkeley.edu.
The PEER center has been designated by the CSSC as "the primary earthquake engineering research arm of the State of California" (PDF file - 205 KB)
posted June 17, 2008