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SEAONC Resiliency Committee and Continuing Education Committee present a seminar on

Designing for Uncertainty: What you need to know about resilience-based design and risk assessment?

Date: Tuesday, April 8th, 2025

Introduction and key concepts

Speaker: Jonathan Buckalew

Jonathan will present key concepts to understand how to design buildings to achieve functional recovery goals. Functional recovery is a building recovery state where a building is able to perform its basic intended function. Designing for functional recovery requires the design team to understand which building systems are critical for functionality so that damage to those components can be limited enough to achieve the target recovery times. Designing individual buildings for functional recovery is critical to improving community resilience. The presentation will review the difference between functional recovery and community resilience, building recovery states, the definition of basic intended function, and challenges around developing a prescriptive procedure to achieve target recovery goals. 

Part 1: Resilience-based design vs risk assessment

Speaker: Ibrahim Almufti

In his talk, Ibbi will focus on resilience-based design vs. risk assessment. He will begin with discussing and differentiating between the various seismic design approaches - including code-based design, performance-based seismic design (PBSD), functional recovery, and resilience-based design (RBD), outlining their distinct performance objectives. He will then discuss the role of risk modeling and assessment within each approach. Ibbi will also address key limitations of these strategies particularly with respect to resilience measurement. To illustrate these concepts in practice, Ibbi will discuss real-world examples and case studies that demonstrate the practical applications and challenges of resilience-based and risk-informed design strategies.

Part 2: Resilient Seismic Design – Emergence Over Past Decade, Codification of Prescriptive Requirements for Functional Recovery, and Evaluation of Structural Systems for New Code Requirements

Speaker: Dr. Curt B. Haselton

In his talk, Dr. Haselton will first discuss how resilient seismic design has emerged and gained traction in the structural engineering industry over the past decade. This will include discussing the important aspect of how these early-adopters have vetted, refined, and improved resilient design procedures over the past 10 years; this effort has now given us the needed confidence to use these approaches more broadly and to now create codified building code requirements for resilient design. Dr. Haselton will then discuss how codified design requirements have been created over the past three years, including both prescriptive and non-prescriptive resilient design, such that these resilient design methods can soon be adopted by jurisdictions and used more broadly in the industry. The talk will close with discussion of current active efforts to then evaluate and quantify structural systems for these new code requirements, to determine appropriate seismic design values for resilient design for functional recovery.

Agenda:

5:30 - 6:00 pm - Registration + Networking with food/drinks*

6:00 - 7:30 pm - Presentations

*Limited exhibitor opportunities available. Contact the main office for additional details.

Location: AIA SF |140 Sutter Street, San Francisco, CA 94104

Cost:

Speakers:

Jonathan Buckalew is a senior project engineer and has worked 14 years at Nabih Youssef Structural Engineers. He received his BS and M.Eng from UC Berkeley. Jon is Co-Chair of the SEAOC Resilience Committee, past board member of SEAONC, and voting member of the Functional Recovery Task Committee of the Provision Update Committee.

Ibrahim Almufti is a Principal in Arup’s Risk and Resilience practice, based in San Francisco. He is a licensed Structural Engineer in California and a Certified Wildfire Mitigation Specialist with significant building design experience. In his current role, Ibbi helps organizations understand their risks to natural hazards, including pioneering approaches to quantify downtime, economic losses, and life safety issues of their building portfolios, and designs effective resilience strategies to mitigate risks. He is a thought leader in resilience-based seismic and multi-hazard design for new and existing buildings, having developed the REDi Rating System, a framework which provides owners, architects, and engineers an approach for achieving “beyond-code” resilience and functional recovery objectives. Ibbi is a member of the Seismic Advisory Board for the University of California, on the Board of Trustees for the non-profit Geohazards International, and is an active contributor and influencer in a number of industry groups to develop the next generation of modern building codes.

Curt B. Haselton, Ph.D., P.E. is a Professor of Civil Engineering at CSU Chico, and the Co-Founder of Haselton Baker Risk Group and SP3 (sp3risk.com).  Dr. Haselton's research is in the areas of resilient design for functional recovery, damage and loss estimation, building code development, collapse safety assessment, ground motion selection and scaling, and the treatment of uncertainties. Among his awards, Dr. Haselton received the Shah Family Innovation Prize for creativity, innovation, and an entrepreneurial spirit in earthquake risk mitigation and management, and the Helmut Krawinkler Award for leadership in implementing state-of-the-art research into practice.