Earthquake resistant building

The recent earthquake in Morocco was a cruel reminder that just building with mud bricks or rammed earth can be deadly.

The biggest conflict in terms of building design is thermal mass. From a comfort perspective one wants as thermal mass as possible in the walls, but from an engineering perspective the building should be as light as possible as the entire building needs to be tied together to survive an earthquake and the amount of reinforcing is proportional to the mass of the building (and its height).


Approaches I have found so far:
- build with reinforced concrete
- wooden frame with lightweight infill
- compressed earth blocks with geomesh on the outside or between layers
- using good geometry

What options did I miss?

Earthbag houses are earthquake resistant per Good Earth Global experience in Nepal.

Thank you for pointing that out!
I was previously skeptical about earthbag because of all the plastic, but it should be possible to use bags / tubes made from natural fibers instead.

Sebastian Köln wrote:What options did I miss?

-reinforced concrete blocks
-reinforced structural bricks
-concrete frame with infill
-steel frame with infill
-wood logs

Stone ashlars can be drilled to insert vertical reinforcing (I did it for my gate).
Any material can be reinforced.

Sebastian Köln wrote:Thank you for pointing that out!
I was previously skeptical about earthbag because of all the plastic, but it should be possible to use bags / tubes made from natural fibers instead.

The best earthbag construction is done with long continuous bags instead of small individual ones, which I'd imagine is stronger. Do you know of a source of long fiber tube bags?

T Simpson wrote:Do you know of a source of long fiber tube bags?

There is a lot of hemp grown in the area I am interested in, I was thinking about feeding that into a circular loom.

Cristobal Cristo wrote:

Sebastian Köln wrote:What options did I miss?

-reinforced concrete blocks
-reinforced structural bricks
-concrete frame with infill
-steel frame with infill
-wood logs

If wood is an inexpensive option, that is probably the best as it is flexible enough to just flex and not take much damage. Unfortunately the dry areas don't have much forests.
I think a steel frame would be very expensive. In rural areas probably too expensive and too difficult to transport the material.
From the videos of shake table tests that I have seen, bricks and concrete blocks don't perform very well.
A concrete frame with (lightweight) infill is a good option (but requires cement and formwork).


The earthbags gave me an idea to weave reinforment bands between the earth blocks.

The earthbag method made me think of weaving the "bag" into the layers of mud blocks instead.
This also ties the layers together in the vertical direction.

Here are 2 kinds of bands:
- Horizontal bands in green on the inside and outside of each block layer.
- vertical weaving bands that move between the inside and outside of the blocks. Spaced so that every block is supported between bands on every side.

If one has stacks of old tires...
- Interlinked concrete blocks (Video by the India Depatment of Earthquake Engineering)