Earth as a building material for reproduction of ancient buildings in China Meishan cultural park

Jinge Luo¹, Xiaofei Wang², Junhui Luo³

COMPUTER MODELLING & NEW TECHNOLOGIES 2015 19(6) 40-44

¹School of Arts and Design and School of Architecture, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082 China
²School of Civil Engineering, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024 China
³Institute of Geotechnical Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China

Rammed earth was vastly used for ancient buildings in the Meishan region in the central south part of China. However, these rammed earth buildings are rarely found nowadays. During the construction of Meishan Cultural Park, a park that reproduces the ancient architectures and cultures of Meishan region, the rammed earth architectures need to be reconstructed. In this paper, preliminary designs of these buildings were investigated. Specifically, the procedures to build the wall and to select the soils were introduced first. Then the seismic resistance behaviours of a typical rammed earth building in the ancient Meishan region was investigated using finite element modelling. The designed rammed earth walls were found to be able to satisfy the strength requirements of modern building standards. This paper also shows that the modelling of rammed earth buildings can be geotechnical in nature, as opposed to simply structural analysis.