Structural Madness

"Response" is what an object, living or nonliving, gives to a certain situation. It can be passive response or active response but it doesn't matter. What matters is how the buildings respond to earthquakes. Let us say for an example, you take a pendulum and you pull it to a certain height and leave it for free oscillation. What you will see is the mass attached at the end of the pendulum moving back and forth constantly, such motion is simple to understand as it is clearly visible to your eyes. The time a pendulum takes to complete one oscillation is called the time period of a pendulum. This factor, "time period" is very important characteristic of a building, it can tell you everything about the building, every ins and outs. Coming back to pendulum and time period, when you plot the motion of pendulum with respect to time it will give you a sinusoidal curve called the response of the pendulum to the disturbance. It will look something like this: Angl...

Urbanization is on it's peak and we, as the resident of that particular city, would like to commute as little as possible to our work on daily basis. So the only option that we do have is to accommodate more and more people into as little area as possible and the only ways we can achieve is to either increase the height or increase the depth of the building. But yes, nobody would like to live underground for the rest of their lives. That narrows down to one option and that is to go tall. But there is a problem.!! Let us say we have about a 10000 sq.ft of land and you are told to design a building. First a 10 story building. You design it quite comfortably for wind as well as seismic you don't see any funny things going on until out building is fairly regular such that it's center of mass and center of rigidity coincides with each other. Now, you are asked to design for 15 story, you still are able to do it but you forces increase and you are looking for sufficient resis...