A PDF copy of pages 284-285 of the book Christchurch: The Transitional City Pt IV. The pages document the transitional project 'Phoenix Wall Re-Painted...'. Photo: Reuben Woods
A photograph of a room in the Diabetes Centre. The furniture in the centre of the room has been covered with a tarpaulin. In the background, the panelling has been removed from one of the walls, exposing the wooden frame, wires, and pipes underneath.
A photograph of the stairwell of the Diabetes Centre on Hagley Avenue. There is a workbench in the foreground and a plank of wood on the right side of the stairs. On the landing the wall has been repaired and is unpainted.
When the magnitude-7.8 earthquake shook North Canterbury nearly three years ago, a 3.5-metre high wall of earth formed on Dave and Rebekah Kelly's sheep and beef station. The 'Wall of Waiau' – as it's now known – sits on a faultline that cuts across a scenic hillside.
A photograph of details in a wall of the Cranmer Courts.
A damaged brick building, the side wall of which has collapsed.
Spray-painted message on a fence reading "Stay clear wall unsafe".
Graffiti on a wall exposed after demolition of the adjoining building.
Do not demo" spray-painted on the wall of a building.
Damage to the wall of a building in the city centre.
A damaged brick building, the side wall of which has collapsed.
Following the recent earthquakes in Chile (2010) and New Zealand (2010/2011), peculiar failure modes were observed in Reinforced Concrete (RC) walls. These observations have raised a global concern on the contribution of bi-directional loading to these failure mechanisms. One of the failure modes that could potentially result from bidirectional excitations is out-of-plane shear failure. In this paper an overview of the recent experimental and numerical findings regarding out-of-plane shear failure in RC walls are presented. The numerical study presents the Finite Element (FE) simulation of wall D5-6 from the Grand Chancellor Hotel that failed in shear in the out-of-plane direction in the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake. The main objective of the numerical study was to investigate the reasons for this failure mode. The experimental campaign includes the recent experiments conducted in the Structural Engineering Laboratory of the University of Canterbury. The experimental study included three rectangular slender RC walls designed based on NZS3101: 2006-A3 (2017) for three different ductility levels, namely: nominally ductile, limited ductile and ductile. The numerical results showed that high axial load combined with bi-directional loading caused the out-of-plane shear failure in wall D5-6 from the Grand Chancellor Hotel. This was also confirmed and further investigated in the experimental phase of the study.
The walls in the stairwell, repaired by injecting glue into the cracks.
Damage to a house. Sections of the brick exterior walls have crumbled.
Jars and bottles fallen from a shelf and trapped between the wall.
A page banner promoting an article about wall art in New Brighton.
A trailer of bricks in front of a house with damaged walls.
A brick wall with flaked paint. The adjourning building has been demolished.
Scaffolding around Satchmo Hairdressing, where sections of the brick wall have crumbled.
One of the most beautiful pieces of wall art (added to the blank walls after buildings were demolished following the earthquakes) in Christchurch, is now being hidden by a new building in front of it. www.flickr.com/photos/johnstewartnz/15499321681/in/...
During the past two decades, the focus has been on the need to provide communities with structures that undergo minimal damage after an earthquake event while still being cost competitive. This has led to the development of high performance seismic resisting systems, and advances in design methodologies, in order respect this demand efficiently. This paper presents the experimental response of four pre-cast, post-tensioned rocking wall systems tested on the shake-table at the University of Canterbury. The wall systems were designed as a retrofit solution for an existing frame building, but are equally applicable for use in new design. Design of the wall followed a performance-based retrofit strategy in which structural limit states appropriate to both the post-tensioned wall and the existing building were considered. Dissipation for each of the four post-tensioned walls was provided via externally mounted devices, located in parallel to post-tensioned tendons for re-centring. This allowed the dissipation devices to be easily replaced or inspected following a major earthquake. Each wall was installed with viscous fluid dampers, tension-compression yielding steel dampers, a combination of both or no devices at all – thus relying on contact damping alone. The effectiveness of both velocity and displacement dependant dissipation are investigated for protection against far-field and velocity-pulse ground motion characteristics. The experimental results validate the behaviour of ‘Advanced Flag-Shape’ rocking, dissipating solutions which have been recently proposed and numerically tested. Maximum displacements and material strains were well controlled and within acceptable bounds, and residual deformations were minimal due to the re-centring contribution from the post-tensioned tendons. Damage was confined to inelastic yielding (or fluid damping) of the external dampers.
A worker constructing the wall of a temporary classroom on the Ilam Oval.
Damage to a house where the wall has crumbled, exposing the internal structure.
A photograph of earthquake damage to the side wall of 154 Manchester Street.
A photograph of a missing detail in a wall of the Cranmer Courts.
A two-storey house where the ground level walls have been boarded up.
Painting on the wall of a broken building visible in the central city.
A wall of a building exposed by the demolition of the adjoining building.
A damaged house with cracks down the wall sits on an uneven surface.
A damaged house, the outer brick wall of which has completely fallen away.