COME TO A RECEPTION AT THE 14TH WORLD CONFERENCE ON EARTHQUAKE ENGINEERING TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS INITIATIVE AND HOW YOU CAN PARTICIPATE. THE RECEPTION WILL BE HELD TUESDAY, OCTOBER 14TH, 18:00–20:00, IN ROOM 112, BUILDING 16, JIUHUA RESORT HOTEL.

Welcome to this website and blog, created by an international group of volunteers from various organizations and agencies, interested in promoting confined masonry construction technology more widely. Confined masonry is a technology that, if built correctly, performs very well in earthquakes. It uses the same basic materials of concrete and brick that are found in unreinforced masonry construction and in reinforced concrete frame construction with masonry infills, but with a different construction sequence and system. In confined masonry construction, the masonry walls carry the seismic loads and the concrete is used to confine the walls. This is in contrast to RC frame buildings with infills where the concrete frames need to carry the load. Those buildings are much more complex to design and build, and often perform very poorly in earthquakes. The bottom line is that well-constructed confined masonry buildings have been observed to incur little or no damage in moderate to even severe earthquakes. Walls are built first and concrete columns and beams poured second (illustration: Schacher)

This website and blog have been created to share information, resources, and ideas in the global community. There are several ways you can use this site:

  • Visit the site and peruse the materials that have been posted here, primarily under Resources. There are 6 categories of information there: an introductory brochure; existing guidelines from various countries around the world; codes and standards from several countries; research and technical papers; training programs that have been developed; and summary information tables that have been prepared as part of a larger report by the EERI student chapter at the University of British Columbia.
  • Make comments on any of the various items that are posted under categories.
  • Contribute new material–guidelines, training programs, other information. To contribute you need to first register at the site with your name and e-mail.
  • Subscribe to an e-mail notification of comments and changes that are made at this site. This will be sent out as a summary once a week.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact any of the members of the confined masonry network listed on this site, or Marjorie Greene at mgreene@eeri.org.