Quake '06 Centennial Lecture Series: Bracing for Disaster by Stephen Tobriner

This lecture presents a revolutionary view of the 1906 earthquake. While popular authors have claimed San Franciscans consistently denied earthquakes and learned nothing from them, this lecture will prove that engineers and architects built earthquake-resistant buildings after the earthquakes of 1868 and 1906. Compared with building performance in contemporary earthquakes elsewhere, San Francisco's buildings performed satisfactorily in the 1906 earthquake. Further, many of the buildings which survived the earthquake of 1906, did not do so by chance, but were designed to be seismically resistant. The intense engineering studies after the 1906 earthquake resulted in avant-garde seismically-resistant buildings, which still stand in San Francisco today. The lecture resurrects the story of forgotten engineers and architects who did not deny earthquakes but actively intervened to save San Francisco.

Stephen Tobriner is a Professor of Architectural History in the Architecture Department at the University of California Berkeley where he has taught for thirty-five years. He has investigated damage in contemporary earthquakes around the world as a member of teams sponsored by the United Nations, the National Science Foundation, the Earthquake Engineering Research Center, and the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. His book, Bracing for Disaster; Earthquake-Resistant Architecture and Engineering in San Francisco, 1838-1933 (Berkeley: The Bancroft Library and Heyday Press) is scheduled to appear in March, 2006.