Our design and construction of the first building in the world founded on a low-cost, low-tech, PVC-sand seismic isolation system received the 2024 Global Design and Innovation award of the Anti-Seismic Systems International Society, Inc., for the category of small-scale buildings.

I have to admit that we gave it a deep thought before submitting it for review as it is quite a unconventional approach with respect to other, amazing high-tech projects that are delivered worldwide that would naturally be submitted in this call. Our building was small and low-cost with too much of a personal effort by our Nepalese partners in National Society for Earthquake Technology – Nepal (NSET).

But our Team decided to give it a chance for a simple reason: we, like others, promote the concept of limiting accelerations on the superstructure. However, both the means and the scope is different. By introducing our very basic PVC-‘sandwitch’, we don’t aim for recentering or ensuring full functionality for the design earthquake. We simply introduce a “fuse” to prevent collapse in case of ground motions that exceed the design one, in regions where even for structures designed to the local seismic codes, quality control is not unconditionally guaranteed.

We are grateful that the Awards Panel of the Anti-Seismic Systems International Society, Inc. acknowledged this salient feature of our design and the challenges met in evolving a simple Matlab script into a real-life construction project following years of small- and large-scale testing.

This award is dedicated to our stakeholders at the Shree Adarsha Secondary School, Kageshwori Manohara Municipality, Kathmandu, Nepal and our leading local experts at National Society for Earthquake Technology – Nepal (NSET). Above all we devote this award to the amazing people that worked on the construction site, and our beloved colleague Nick Alexander who has been our partner on this project from the very beginning but is no longer with us.

In a world where high-tech solutions for seismic resilience are still prohibitive for some parts of the world, thinking out of the box (if such thing even exists) is a fulfilling task on its own right.

For all the wonderful submissions of this competition please refer here: https://assisisociety.org/2024-winners/

A closer look to the awarded Shree Adarsha PVC-sand school building: https://assisisociety.org/…/31_ASSISI-NSET-UoB-Poster…

Congratulations to all.

#resilient_Nepal #PVC_sand_seismic_isolation #seismic_isolation #inclussive_resilience

Acknowledgments:

University of Bristol School of Civil, Aerospace and Design Engineering (CADE) – University of Bristol, Arup

Surya Narayan Shrestha, Ramesh Guragain, Narayan Prasad Marasini, Vibek Manandhar, Sangib Shrestha, Rabin Chaulagain, Vita Sanderson, Hayley Gryc, Timurhan Timur, Jorze Lopez, Hima Shrestha, Anthea Terry (Hawke)