Developing guidelines for the design of seismically resilient and sustainable tall building structures
BC Housing is a provincial organization running British Columbia’s housing assistance programs and is also one of the province’s largest housing developers. Many of the areas served by BC Housing has high seismicity and at the same time are subjected to increasingly stringent regulations on environmental and emission goals imposed by all levels of government. Of particular interest is the development of tall residential structures, which are high in occupant density, high in embodied carbon emissions and can be subjected to elevated risk in a major earthquake. This is an area where minimum building code requirement may not be good enough for meeting the safety, resiliency and sustainability performance objectives required by regulators and building officials.
To guide decision-making for large capital investments involved in the construction of new high-rise residential structures, Kinetica Risk performed a study characterizing the impacts of various design practice and performance objectives on the cost and building performance in terms of safety, insurable loss, re-occupancy time and embodied carbon costs. The latter is an emerging key metric identified by a number of government climate change policies, including that from the City of Vancouver and the federal government of Canada. To capture the local construction practice, Kinetica Risk developed representative tall building archetypes from existing survey information and other similar buildings designed by engineers practicing in the area. Thousands of high-fidelity seismic risk simulations were performed for each archetype and their variations related to different design choices that reflect different levels of performance, including the baseline code minimum requirement. Probabilistic loss and environmental impact metrics were determined and were mapped out along with the upfront cost premiums for each option to provide intuitive guidance for BC Housing, and local developers for identifying potential opportunities to cut loss, and emissions through holistic resilience and sustainable thinking. This information can also be used by decision-makers to build sound business cases that justifies spending on improving resilience and meeting emission reduction goals.
