Base isolation retrofitting design for the existing 2-story stone building and its Conversion into a 3-Story kindergarten

Recently the Armenian Missionary Association of America (AMAA) has approached the author of this paper with the request to carry out base isolation retrofitting design for the existing 2-story building with stone bearing walls and to simultaneously convert it into a 3-story kindergarten. In Armenia seismic isolation of existing buildings is becoming a more common method of providing protection from earthquake damage. Thanks to the author’s works in nowadays Armenia is well known as a country where seismic (base and roof) isolation systems are widely implemented in construction of new and retrofitting of existing buildings. The number of seismically isolated buildings per capita in Armenia is one of the highest in the world – second after Japan. The paper given below emphasizes that Armenia achieved significant results also in local manufacturing/testing of seismic isolation laminated rubber-steel bearings (SILRSBs). Several remarkable projects on retrofitting by base isolation of the existing buildings like apartment, school, hotel and hospital buildings are briefly mentioned in the paper to demonstrate the retrofitting experience accumulated in Armenia. Based on the gained experience further developments take place and unique base isolation structural concepts and technologies created by the author are applied more and more to the existing buildings. In this paper base isolation retrofitting design and analysis by the Armenian Seismic Code for the 2-story building with stone bearing walls is described. This will be a first application of base isolation retrofitting technology to an existing stone building with simultaneous increase of the number of its floors by one. The other important factor is that applied structural concept allows retrofitting by base isolation when reconstruction works in superstructure and construction of the additional 3-rd floor were going on in the same time.