The Role of Architects and Engineers

Interview with Shin Sakurai, interviewed by Hirokazu Miyazaki

I'm writing here about what I was doing on March 11, 2011, and also writing my comments about the direction of general architecture/design after the 3/11 disaster. That day, I was conducting a mandatory inspection of a university laboratory, which I designed two years prior to March 11, 2011. When the initial jolt occurred, I was on the fourth floor of the seven-story building. Since the building was designed as a quake-absorbing structure, we felt the quake, but it seemed to be approximately a level 3 on the Japanese scale. Of course, it was no problem to stay standing upright, but it shook just enough to feel like a really big shake. I thought that the jolt which I felt must have been from the restorative force of the rubber of the quake-absorbing structure. As a result, there were no serious damages in the building. There are several agricultural departments’ laboratories and research offices in the building with a lot of fragile equipment such as beakers and flasks, but the quake did not cause much damage to that equipment. Usually, elevators are programmed to stop once the system detects an earthquake, but they normally restart working right after the initial jolt. However, I finally realized that there was something extremely abnormal going on when I saw how severely the lightning rods of neighboring buildings were shaking. My building is equipped with a measuring device that records the degree of jolts when a quake hits the building. I checked this device later and found out that the initial jolt shook the building at 4cm.

The university is in Tokyo's Machida City. On the day of the earthquake, I could not go back home because all public transportation was out of service. The university kindly let me stay over at their facility. Several districts near the university suffered a blackout. Depending on the location of the electric substations, it was clear where the blackout areas were and where the normal areas were (roads were often clear geographical markers). I thought that we might have to think about redesigning electric circuits to provide electricity from multiple substations for different districts, if we can make such infrastructure. When I designed a hotel building for an international hotel corporation, the corporation had a standard requiring their engineers to secure electricity from multiple substations. I thought that this kind of circuit method was meant for regions with frequent blackouts such as developing nations with poor energy supplies. However, I had to change my mind after this earthquake.

The Saturday and Sunday after the earthquake, I inspected the damage of the university facilities. This school has more than 100 buildings, and it took two entire days to finish the inspection even though we had multiple people on this job. As we predicted, we found damage to the buildings that were constructed before 1980 under the previous earthquake-resistant standard. Also, most importantly, the earthquake had scattered books in many of professors’ offices, and those books had become obstacles particularly to inward-opening doors. As a result, some people had a hard time evacuating from their buildings. Based on this inspection, we use sliding doors in newly erected buildings for the university as much as possible.

Also, a critical theme for us is how to maintain buildings that have lost their infrastructure supplies, an integral aspect to improving the quality of earthquake resistance. Even before the 3/11 earthquake, as a part of our BCP (Business Continuity Program) and LCP (Life Continuity Program), we, Kume Sekkei Co., Ltd., proposed to design buildings with self-sufficient water and electricity systems in case of a disaster. When we accept any project, we make it mandatory to discuss these systems with our clients. We just completed a building with the BCP and LCP standards last year in the Chubu region (central Japan) and are currently designing a hospital with the same concept.