Istanbul Opens World’s Largest Earthquake-Safe Building

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The world’s largest seismically isolated building, the new international terminal at Istanbul’s Sabiha Gökçen Airport, is now complete and open for business.

Stretching across more than 2 million square feet, the terminal doesn’t sit directly on the soil, but rather on more than 300 isolators, bearings that can move side-to-side during an earthquake. The whole building moves as a single unit, which prevents damage from uneven forces acting on the structure.

“What an isolation system does is that it enables the building to move through large displacements in unison, and in doing that, you absorb earthquake energy,” said Atila Zekioglu, the engineer at the firm Arup, who designed the building.

Earthquakes accelerate buildings laterally, whipping them back and forth. Isolators (see photo below) slow down the motion of the building. In the case of the new terminal, the building will only have to withstand one-fifth of the acceleration that it would have had to without the earthquake proofing.
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Luckily, designing structures for that kind of performance has become cheaper and easier. Increased computing enables better simulations of how buildings will act when an earthquake hits.
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The new type, triple friction pendulum isolators manufactured by Earthquake Protection Systems in Vallejo, are more compact and can reduce the cost of constructing a building, he said. Many buildings, including three new hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area, are now incorporating the new isolators.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/worlds-largest-earthquake-safe-building/

Now this is an interesting development to say the least.