Disaster Resilient Infrastructure Design

Seismic base isolation is among the most effective structural engineering technologies for protecting buildings from earthquake damage: rather than rigidly anchoring a structure to the ground, isolator bearings made of layered rubber and steel, or sliding friction pendulum bearings, are placed between the building and its foundation, allowing the ground to move rapidly beneath the structure while the building itself sways far more slowly and gently. San Francisco's City Hall, a landmark Beaux-Arts building completed in 1915, was retrofitted with 530 base isolators between 1994 and 1998 at a cost of roughly $300 million, following the building's survival of, but exposure to serious risk from, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake; Japan has adopted the technology even more extensively, with several thousand base-isolated buildings constructed nationwide since the 1980s.