Invincible Airport

摘要

Turkey's 1999 Kocaeli earthquake killed 17,000 people, thousands of them simply because they were in seismicaliy unsound buildings. This year, the design firm Arup built Istanbul's airport-the emergency gateway in any future quake-to withstand an 8.0-magnitude earthquake (the Kocaeli was a 7.4). The building's resilience comes from 300 rubber-and-steei springs called seismic isolators, typically 12 to 60 inches long, that allow for horizontal movement in the layer between ground and building.