Seismic retrofit of church buildings through base isolation

Base Isolation has demonstrated to be a very efficient means for protecting buildings against destructive earthquakes. The application of base isolation to existing monumental buildings has been made quite extensively in the United States [1-9] to buildings charachterized by structural typologies which are not very close to the older typologies existing in Europe. In this paper the possibilities of application of Base Isolation to church buildings is demonstrated through dynamic numerical analyses which have modeled the entire building. The efficacy of Base Isolation is demonstrated through a comparison of performance with the existing monument and with the monument retrofitted via some techniques which are very common: insertion of rigid diaphragm. It is concluded that the insertion of rigid diaphragm does not always provide better performance and that base isolation could be adopted in most cases for the seismic retrofit of churches.