1. Climate Change and Environmental Protection
During my field study, I was actively involved in the construction of a modern building that would be strong enough to cope with earthquakes. We would achieve this by using strategic building construction practice that could help prevent life threatening collapses and limit damages to repairable proportions. In order to achieve this, several safe construction procedures were applied. Initially, the layout and planning of the building involved the consideration of the strategic location of the various rooms, walls, openings like doors and windows and also the number of floors to be constructed. Site and foundation aspects were other key considerations that the construction team considered during the initial stages of the construction. As part of initial construction planning activities, steps to furnish the lateral resistance and critical considerations of vulnerable sections, highly stressed areas, pillars and sections which are highly likely to be affected by the earthquake forces with respective reinforcement required laid down. This provided me with an ideal overview of the structural action, structural vulnerabilities and mechanisms of damage to buildings due to earthquakes. As the planning and layout foundations were carried out, there are several key technical lessons that I learnt. In a bid to construct buildings which are safer and able to withstand external forces, instead of structures being brittle and able to collapse suddenly, reinforcements should be included to make them tough and able to deform or deflect a reasonable amount of external force. This we achieved by using resistive elements like shear walls and bracing. These elements were evenly distributed throughout the initial construction procedures in multi-directions.
In our initial construction layout, all the elements which include the roof and openings among others were tied together. This was in a bid to reduce the effects accompanying earthquake forces.
