Shake Test for Mass Timber Rocking Wall

May 22, 2023

Fast Company

In a single day in early May, one 10-story building survived the brunt of some of the biggest earthquakes in recent history.

Standing in a clearing next to a warehouse outside San Diego on what’s known as a shake table, this building was put through a battery of tests to analyze its seismic resilience, shaking side to side and up and down with forces at the upper end of the Richter scale. But unlike most tall buildings around the world that have been hit by big earthquakes, this 10-story building’s structure is made out of wood. Also unlike many of the rigid but brittle concrete and steel mid- and high-rises that stand in cities around the world, this wooden building came out of these full-force earthquake simulations intact.

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Anyeley Hallová is a Portland-based developer who has worked with Lever Architecture on two timber-based buildings, both a few stories in height. Since launching her own firm, Adre, she’s partnered again with Lever on a project now in the design phase using the same mass timber rocking wall technique used in the NHERI project. She says that project is bolstered by the results from the NHERI test. The structural approach, she says “is demonstrating its commercial viability as a cost effective solution and providing a code pathway for other developers to incorporate this form of seismic resilience into their buildings.”