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Earthquake risk comes up in discussions about reasons for not building taller. Meanwhile Tokyo has plenty of tall buildings and gets earthquakes all the time. I
by ajmurmann 7y ago
Earthquake risk comes up in discussions about reasons for not building taller. Meanwhile Tokyo has plenty of tall buildings and gets earthquakes all the time. I've never gotten a good explanation for this and don't know enough to judge if this is just another NIMBY excuse or legitimate.
- wahern 7y agoThe notion that we have no real-world experience with how modern skyscrapers behave in earthquakes doesn't pass muster, for exactly the reason you pointed out. Not only is the scientific research easy to find on Google, but we can see videos of events on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zw-BvKo0pI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zw-BvKo0pI, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gglhWS23HfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gglhWS23HfM The notion that bedrock is a requirement is also easily refuted by a simple search of the scientific literature. TL;DR: it's complicated, obviously, but one potential advantage of friction piles and a floating foundation is less movement. We don't need to be professional structural engineers to reject such simplistic, categorical notions; they're patently flawed.
- arbitrary_name 7y agoIt's not legit. There's techniques to build tall in earthquake prone areas; such as building on rollers (New Zealand has some interesting examples of this approach), framing techniques, etc.