Restoration of a historic adobe church

Historic and therefore older adobe buildings, because of the nature of their construction, always suffer severe damage during major earthquakes. This paper describes the rehabilitation of an almost 100-year-old adobe church using welded-steel mesh as a stability retrofit measure. The objectives of the rehabilitation were to create a structure capable of surviving a strong seismic event and to do so without damaging the original dynamics and architectural character of the building. The church has 7.9-m-high lateral adobe walls and a timber-truss roof system. The slenderness ratio of the walls is 10. Since its rehabilitation, this church has successfully withstood 16 earthquakes with magnitudes from 4.1 to 6.0.