Preventing Irregularity Effects of Infills Through Modifying Architectural Drawings

Experiences of past earthquakes show that some designed and constructed buildings by engineers have been damaged during earthquakes because of negative effects of infill walls. The main aim of this paper is to prevent the amount of overall detrimental effects of infill walls such as torsion and soft story in a conventional residential building based on seismic codes of some countries and to use the maximum potential of walls. The results show that building in construction condition may suffer torsion because infills which are not modelled in design process are attached to the structure in construction phase. Contrary to the initial impression that there is a soft story in municipal buildings because of parking on ground floor, in buildings with architectural plan similar to the analyzed one, soft story would not happen. Furthermore, this case study proves that it is possible to prevent irregularity effects of infills through modifying architectural drawings without fundamental changes in concept, functional and aesthetic aspects. For modifying architectural drawings an algorithm is proposed in this research.