San Francisco, CA
The Wharfside Building at China Basin Landing project was a voluntary seismic upgrade to an existing 6-story, 540,000 sq. ft. concrete building built in 1922 in San Francisco, CA. BRB’s were utilized in new exterior towers, along with new shotcrete piers, FRP beams, and steel collectors to provide efficient seismic resistance with minimal disruption to the existing building and its systems. In all, 60 BRB’s, with capacities ranging from 550 to 1200 kips, were utilized and they needed to fit within a narrow plaza between 2 buildings and still leave room for access around the towers. This meant the BRB’s would need to be relatively short, about 12 to 16 feet long, for these large, high-capacity braces. Because BRB’s need to stretch and compress to allow some building movement during a seismic event, short BRB’s can be challenging due to limits on the yielding core length. This challenge was met with the use of pinned connections to the gusset plates which provided compact connections and maximized the available yielding length in each BRB. Being exposed to view, the pinned BRB’s also provided a clean, elegant look that compliments the surrounding plaza.
Engineer: Nabih Youssef Associates
Braces: 60 Pinned BRBs
