Structural characterization of Eastern Canada’s old industrial masonry buildings via typological analysis: part I – construction technologies through time

Industrial unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings are an important part of the existing building stock in Eastern Canada, a region characterised by high-frequency and low-to-moderate magnitude earthquakes. Despite their inherent vulnerability to earthquakes, these non-engineered buildings are being increasingly targeted for reuse purposes in many densely populated cities in the region. A lack of knowledge of local construction techniques, materials and architectural types paired with limited information of their characteristics leads seismic retrofits to be even more disruptive than usual. Often, such seismic retrofits result in expensive and complex designs or avoidable partial demolitions. Typological analysis is utilised in this work to identify local recurrent building archetypes and technologies through archival resources, as well as their evolution through time, as a first step to addressing the lack of information about the structural characteristics of this building type. Results from this study inform subsequent critical and more quantitative investigations conducted in the companion paper, where the first building database focusing on Eastern Canada’s old industrial URM constructions is presented and comprehensively reviewed. This research will enable engineering practitioners and applied researchers to decrease epistemic uncertainties and confidence factors in their structural/seismic assessments, vital to develop rational retrofits.