In a Taiwan warehouse, researchers hit a button, and a five-storey, steel-and-concrete box begins to buck and sway.
That's about the closest researchers can get to how the sort of multi-storey commonly constructed in New Zealand 9000km away might behave in a large earthquake.
The revelations from the work are now coming in.
"You know, partition walls, gypsum board that we use, windows, doors, even ceilings, which previously we thought would do worse in more robust buildings, we're seeing all these components do much better," said Santiago Pujol.
The Canterbury University civil engineering professor is used to finding things out - he won a top US award two years ago, looking into high-strength steel in reinforced concrete members, but the ceiling performance in the Taipei prototype tests surprised him.
"Yeah, that's one of the things that we've sort of discovered here recently."
There had been some research into this before, but it wasn't systematic. Now it is.
The overall upshot of the New Zealand-Taiwan efforts is to solidify a growing global consensus that stiffer buildings that "drift" less perform better in quakes - opposite to the way New Zealand has built for many decades.
On top of that, they have shown it need not cost much, say, only 1-2 percent of the total building budget to make it stiffer.
"You want to maximise ability to deform and then you want to minimise deformation demand, if you will," Pujol said in engineering-speak.
"It's in that sense that we can improve things, if we make buildings more robust, closer to what they build in Chile and Japan."
Japan had built this way for a century, since the Great Kantō Earthquake split Tokyo in 1923, and Chile since the 1930s.
"You know, some of these things take time to understand and professions adhere to different schools of thought.
"By now, it's fairly clear the consensus - the worldwide consensus - is that we need more robust buildings."
Santiago Pujol is a professor of civil engineering at Canterbury University. Photo: University of Canterbury
'We could act a little faster'
The United States was going this way, and so too Türkiye, where they were trying to change the building code to avoid a repeat of the 2023 quake that killed over 40,000 people.
"I think we could act a little faster," Pujol said of New Zealand. "The first thing we need to do is update our building standards to require more robustness."
Those conversations were already happening with the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment that oversees the building code, he added.
"New Zealand does have good building codes that protect the lives of their occupants. What we're talking about here is buildings that go beyond just life safety and try to ensure, again, functionality. It's a different model."
Hospitals were an example of buildings that needed to function fast after a shake.
Data provided by the Health Ministry in Chile to his team had shown stiffer hospitals there performed better.
He did not know the specifics about hospitals being built in New Zealand, but said he did know of several local companies already trying to build stiffer, more robust buildings.
"And by that I mean buildings that drift or sway less in earthquakes, because that's going to minimise damage and allow us to go back into our buildings sooner after an earthquake."
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