The Earthquake Engineering Online Archive

Van Nuys Hotel building testbed report: exercising seismic performance assessment

Krawinkler, Helmut

PEER-2005/11, Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center, University of California, Berkeley, 2005, pdf (400/P33/2005-11)

PEER has established a series of PEER Methodology Testbeds, which are real facilities, inventories of facilities, or networks to which the PEER performance-based earthquake engineering assessment methodologies can be applied. The primary purpose of the testbeds is to assess the applicability of the methodologies and foster their refinement. The testbed study in this report concerns a hotel building in Southern California for which the primary performance issues are (a) financial losses due to structural and nonstructural damage and (b) the probability of collapse, which will dominate the life-safety issue. The building is an older reinforced concrete building representative of a class of buildings constructed in the 1960s in the western United States. Instrumental records and damage from past earthquakes make it suitable for verifying analytical models and simulation platforms, while its seismic deficiencies make it suitable for rigorous implementation of the assessment methodology. An attempt is made to illustrate how individual parts of a seismic performance assessment process can be executed in order to provide information that is needed downstream for decision making based on predicted performance.

Available online: http://peer.berkeley.edu/publications/peer_reports/reports_2005/PEER_511_KRAWINKLER_testbed.pdf