Ricerc@Sapienza

The high socio-economic impacts of moderate-to-strong earthquakes in terms of damage, dollars and downtime have highlighted the great divergence between societal expectations and the reality of modern building seismic performance. Community strongly requires raising the bar of the current seismic design philosophy, that conceives structures as ductile systems where inelasticity is concentrated within plastic hinge regions. Well complying with these methodologies many modern buildings have behaved as expected in recent earthquakes, however in many cases they were severely damaged.

Lessons from recent earthquakes have provided a tough reality check of the current seismic design approach,
highlighting a critical mismatch between societal expectations over the reality of seismic performance of modern
buildings. The performance-based design criteria and objectives need a paradigm shift towards low-damage design
philosophy and technologies that should The project provided the opportunity to coordinate a unique research effort for
the development and possible future implementation in the European Environment of an integrated low-damage