Location Dependency on Resilience and Material Intensity of an Office Building Keeping an Eye on Seismic Zone Implications

To describe the urban metabolism of the built environment, bottom-up approaches are often used in literature. In these approaches building typologies play an important role, where the material intensity of building types is described by material composition indicators. These indicators are mostly static and refer to the construction method of the respective type. However, the influence of the geological conditions of the location on the material requirement has so far hardly been examined, if at all. Many of the fast-growing cities, especially in developing countries, which generate a high demand for materials, are located in areas that are regularly hit by earthquakes. This is accompanied by different static requirements for one and the same building type if it is located in different seismic zones. Using FEM, for a selected office building it was investigated which role plays the location of this building with regard to its material consumption, i.e. how the static requirements from the seismic load in different zones affect the demand for mass relevant building materials of the supporting structure. For this purpose, a 3D building model was created and the load-bearing components were dimensioned under the load combinations typical for the seismic zones. The modeling results show a clear dependence of the building material requirement on the seismic zone in which the building type is located. However, static building type-specific approaches with constant material composition indicators do not reflect this effect. In conclusion, it should be noted that seismic zone dependence should be given greater consideration in the modeling of material composition indicators in the future.