Engineers, architects 'must work together'

MARC GREENHILL

Kirk Hargreaves

TEAMWORK: Andrew Charleson, an associate professor in architecture at Wellington's Victoria University speaks to the commission today.

Engineers and architects must work together to integrate earthquake technology into new Christchurch building designs, an inquiry has heard.

New technology for the central-city rebuild was discussed before the Canterbury earthquakes royal commission today.

Academics, senior engineers and professional engineering organisations have been invited to debate building design philosophies, such as life safety versus building survivability, and associated economic impacts.

Andrew Charleson, an associate professor ofarchitecture at Wellington's Victoria University, today told commissioners the interaction between architects and engineers was "always a struggle", but the challenge now was to work together to achieve a design that met the needs of both professions. "It's particularly challenging in the area of seismic design because the structure we need to resist earthquake forces is so much larger in its plan area than the structure needed just to resist the weight of the building," he said. The use of new seismic technology need not reduce the architectural quality, Charleson said. He once asked a group of architecture students to determine the "most exciting" design from 10 cities with high seismic activity and 10 with low seismic activity without knowing which category each city was in. "When we analysed all the results, it came out that if anything, the buildings that were in the seismic zones had more architectural appeal than the buildings in non-seismic zones," Charleson said. "This was incredibly encouraging because intuitively you would think of the constraints imposed on architects because of the need for large shear walls and large braced frames. You'd expect that the architecture would be somewhat blander and less interesting, but that was proven not to be the case."

- Fairfax NZ News

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Engineers, architects 'must work together'