Seismic Assessment of a Historical Masonry Building in Switzerland: The “Ancien Hôpital De Sion”

This article presents the results of the evaluation of the seismic safety of the Ancien Hôpital de Sion, an important Swiss architectural heritage building, situated in the Canton of Valais, the region with the highest seismic hazard in Switzerland. Three-dimensional Applied Element (AEM) modeling of the whole structure has been performed and validated. The adopted modeling strategy, together with nonlinear dynamic analysis, was able to represent the actual behavior and failure mechanisms typical of complex masonry structures, in addition to a good computational efficiency compared to other available numerical approaches. The local collapse mechanisms have been also studied through a kinematic limit analysis based on rigid block rotation. Both linear and nonlinear approaches have been followed together with the capacity spectrum method. The results provided by the different methodologies have been compared with the aim to provide possible insights concerning a general procedure for the assessment of the safety of such type of structures.