earthquake

earthquake 02.27.10

city form: architecture

Chile is home to the most powerful earthquake ever recorded—a 9.5 magnitude in 1960. Consequently building code is quite seismically strict and rigorously enforced. The current trend for new buildings in Santiago is for light, transparent glass skins, which one would think to be a high risk for failure during the shifts and rumblings of a quake. But the damage from the 8.8 magnitude earthquake this morning was relatively minimal, a testament to the ability of building code to save lives. To quote CNN coverage of the catastrophe, ‘earthquakes don’t kill people, buildings kill people.’ Luckily that was not as much the case here, versus the earthquake in Haiti last month that was incredibly devastating due to substandard building practices.