Paper Number 45 Performance Assessment of Existing Buildings in New Zealand

Conference Earthquake risk assessment of buildings inventory requires assessing the vulnerability of building to various levels of hazard. The lateral strength and deformation capacity of buildings with various categories differ due to reasons which include their construction vintage, material of construction, structural detailing and other structural characteristics. One of the biggest challenges in deriving the physical vulnerability model is to acquire an appropriate database of building inventory. In this paper, the types of building structures in New Zealand are reviewed and a suitable classification scheme is proposed. The historical code developments are discussed to emphasize the inherent building characteristics with respect to the building system and the vintage of the code. Further, to obtain the lateral strength and deformation profiles of the buildings, a rational procedure is developed based on the lines suggested for Initial and Detailed Assessment Procedures recommended by a study group of the New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering. In this paper, fragility functions are developed for typical wooden houses, masonry houses and reinforced-concrete moment resisting frames, which predominantly comprise the New Zealand inventory.