Characterisation of the built heritage of historic centres oriented to the assessment of its seismic vulnerability: the case of Cuenca, Ecuador

Abstract

The city of Cuenca, located in southern Ecuador, has a high level of seismic hazard. Within the framework of the first stage of the seismic vulnerability project Seismic damage scenarios of the built heritage of the Historic Centre of Cuenca, the main objective of the present work was to establish a catalogue of adobe and brick buildings typical of the Historic Centre of Cuenca. In this sense, based on the assumption of three categories of plan area size for each of the two typologies, the variability of different dimensional and non-dimensional geometric parameters was studied (e.g. floor plan shape, aspect ratio, number of storeys, interstorey height, wall thickness, distribution of interior walls). This variability was explored in different ways; of particular interest may be the archival work with intervention records for the study of the distribution of interior walls. The catalogue of typical buildings was the result of the effort to capture the typicality (e.g. most frequent cases, mean values) of the geometric parameters considered.