Seismic Isolation Devices for Protecting RC Buildings: The Frangipane School in Reggio Calabria

Seismic isolation devices, as known, are particularly efficient tools for the protection of newly designed or existing buildings and infrastructures and for the mitigation of maximum effects due to earthquakes. The highest is the vulnerability of a given existing construction, and the higher is the benefit in structural terms due to a possible retrofit intervention based on base isolation. This is especially the case of reinforced concrete (RC) building frames built in the 1960s in the Italian context and originally designed with a code of the first generation (“Regio Decreto Legge 25 Marzo 1935, n. 640”) in a city characterized by a long history of severe earthquakes (as the Reggio Calabria and Messina earthquake in 1908), and thus recognized as highly seismic regions. In this paper, a case-study application is proposed for the Frangipane school constructed in Reggio Calabria (Italy) and recently subjected to a major renovation intervention for its retrofit against the high seismic hazard.