Jack P. Moehle, T.Y. and Margaret Lin Professor of Engineering, was the honored speaker at the CEE Spring Distinguished Lecture. View his lecture, Performance-Based Seismic Design of Tall Buildings.
The surge in tall building design and construction in the mid-2000s was notable not only for the number of buildings but also for the innovative structural systems being used. Most designs fell outside the prescriptive provisions of the building code, requiring an alternative performance approach.
Moehle launched the Tall Buildings Initiative, a collaboration of researchers, practicing engineers, building officials, and a broad range of funding agencies. The program funded a series of projects in topics including performance objectives; earthquake ground motion simulation, selection, and scaling; soil-foundation-structure interaction; tall building dynamic response characteristics; quantification of the economics of alternative design objectives; and a recommended performance-based design methodology.
Moehle teaches in CEE's Structural Engineering, Mechanics and Materials program. He was founding director of the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center. In 2014, Moehle was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and was named Académico Correspondiente by the Academia de Ingeniería Mexico in 2015. He is also a recent recipient of SEONC's Helmut Krawinkler Award (2015) and was named a fellow of ASCE's Structural Engineers Institute (2015).