Haiti is not alone amongst developing nations that have suffered losses due to the poor construction of concrete and masonry structures in an earthquake. In the wake of the disaster, a considerable amount of public sympathy and substantial funding was raised that supported short term, front line activities. However, there is little recognition of the need for adequately funded systems of organi...

The Azores archipelago is a small and remote region with low population levels where the issues of sustainability and autonomy have a lways been important and present s ignif icant economic consequences. Currently, the construction industry uses many imported products; however, masonry products are almost exclusively provided by local industries. For its production, masonry uses a natural volca...

One view of conceptual design in architecture is as a negotiation between materials and forms. The process of configuring materials: organizing them, ordering them, arraying them emerges in the creative nature of design practice and the underpinnings of this process are embodied in the tools of architectural inquiry, traditionally: sketching, diagramming, modeling and drawing, and now in the di...

Masonry infill has been widely used as building material due to its cost effectiveness and availability.  The failure of these masonry infill walls during the past earthquakes have underscored the importance of ensuring the safety of the infill walls when it is subjected to lateral loads. In-plane and out of plane failures have been observed in many reinforced concrete framed building with maso...

Virtually all masonry arch bridges contain masonry parapets and, because of the possibility that these may be extensively damaged following a vehicle impact, it is often reported that these give engineers more cause for concern than the arch barrel itself. Over the past decade research has been carried out to gain an understanding of the fundamental modes of resistance of unreinforced masonry p...

High, sustained loads in masonry cause time-dependent deformations, which can lead to failure of the construction. This phenomenon mostly occurs in high constructions, such as historical towers, where the dead load imposes significant stresses on the base of the tower [4]. As knowledge and experimental data are lacking to describe this time-dependent behavior in historical masonry, a research p...

In the last decade, displacement-based seismic design procedures have been recognised to be effective alternatives to force-based design (FBD) methods. Indeed, displacement based design (DBD) may allow the structural engineer to get more realistic predictions of local and global deformations of the structure, and hence damage, under design earthquakes. This facilitates the achievement of perfor...

Natural stone is a durable construction material which has been used through centuries for various types of structures. These structures are exposed to corrosive and degradation factors such as climate change and pollution, natural ageing, earthquake actions, increasing urbanization and even human negligence, potentially exposing them to irreversible structural damage and loss. Considering the ...

the baluarte do cavaleiro is part of the stone masonry wall system existing in the city ofchaves of portugal and it is a construction dated from the xvii century. the baluarte docavaleiro is formed by three walls (north-east, ne; south-east, se; south-west, sw) andby two junction elements (designated here by cunhais). the se wall has suffered twocollapses recently. the main objective of this re...