[Cob] cob and earthquakes

[Amanda Peck]

Mass can get you into trouble.  Of course.  But looking at the pictures of 
the Bam earthquake, it looks like the fortress mostly stayed standing.  In 
other words the really really heavy, well buttressed building survived.  
With the newer stuff, some did collapse into power.

Cob studies.  Links, bibliography, please.  I don't think I've seen them.  
There's that one book on structural engineering for straw and adobe, not, I 
think much about cob in that, although I haven't seen it in a long time.

In the Minke manual that I seem to post a link to EVERY WEEK, he says that 
he and his graduate student(s) concluded that skimping on building with 
earth (not particularly cob) was what leads to failure in an earthquake. 
Skimping on mass, lintels, buttressing (which can make up for the wrong 
shape, also a factor).

http://www.gtz.de/basin/publications/books/ManualMinke.pdf

In the interests of anti-true-believerdom--Minke has also published 
stuff--not readily available in English--on bamboo.  My German extends about 
as far as "Guten tag" and "bambu."  Most of his field work seems to have 
been in South America, where both earthen and bamboo building are possible.


.............
Exchange between Kyle Towers and someone (snipped and resnipped):

 >that was one of the few buildings left
 > standing after a major earthquake hit.  I think that the idea behind
 > cob is that it is a monolithic building structure > The tensile and shear 
strength of something built well seems phenomenal
 > to me.

     The mass, however, could easily be considered
to be so.  Alas, it is often mass that gets a building in trouble in an
earthquake.  The foundation moves and the massive inertia of the building
causes it to be left behind.

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