Abstract—Past earthquakes have shown that seismic events may incur large economic losses in buildings. FEMA P-58 provides engineers a practical tool for the performance seismic assessment of buildings. In this study, FEMA P-58 is applied to two typical Italian pre-1970 reinforced concrete frame buildings, characterized by plain rebars as steel reinforcement and masonry infills and partitions. G...

In this paper, we define twinnings for affine R-buildings. We thus extend the theory of simplicial twin buildings of affine type to the non-simplicial case. We show how classical results can be extended to the non-discrete case, and, as an application, we prove that the buildings at infinity of aMoufang twin R-building have the induced structure of aMoufang building. The latter is not true for ...

We develop a network coding technique based on flags of subspaces and a corresponding network channel model. To define error correcting codes we introduce a new distance on the flag variety, the Grassmann distance on flags and compare it to the commonly used gallery distance for full flags.

Global sustainability goals have led to the development of the green building movement. The Green Building Program, stemming from the movement, has had unprecedented success as it provides a quantifi able metric to people’s efforts towards sustainable development. Sustainable development and green buildings are often used interchangeably. Although, sustainable development and green buildings ar...

The vulnerability of buildings on coastal dikes due to overtopping wave impacts is difficult to assess. A method is developed in this paper to quantify the vulnerability of masonry buildings on a coastal dike exposed to wave overtopping. Using previous studies, the accidental loads due to the extreme wave impacts are characterized. Using the approach from Eurocode 6, the strength of masonry bui...

Buildings with cast-in-situ reinforced concrete shear walls are widespread in many earthquake-prone countries and regions, such as Canada, Chile, Romania, Turkey, Colombia, the republics of the former Soviet Union, etc. This type of construction has been practiced since the 960s in urban regions for mediumto high-rise buildings (4 to 35 stories high). Shear wall buildings are usually regular in...

In low-collisionality plasmas, anisotropic heat conduction due to a magnetic field leads to buoyancy instabilities for any nonzero temperature gradient. We study analogous instabilities in degenerate collisional plasmas, i.e., when the electron collision frequency is large compared to the electron cyclotron frequency. Although heat conduction is nearly isotropic in this limit, the small residua...

We show that if a homeomorphism between the ideal boundaries of two Fuchsian buildings preserves the combinatorial cross ratio almost everywhere, then it extends to an isomorphism between the Fuchsian buildings. It follows that Mostow rigidity holds for Fuchsian buildings: if a group acts properly and cocompactly on two Fuchsian buildings X and Y , then X and Y are equivariantly isomorphic. Mat...

Motivated by a desire to discover how buildings operate in practice and inspired by the pioneering PROBE Studies (post-occupancy review of buildings and their engineering) the author has spent the last decade investigating both the design and the users’ perceptions of (mainly) sustainable buildings. This has involved visiting some 60 commercial or institutional buildings worldwide, interviewing...