Integral Lifting and Seismic Isolation Retrofit of Great Hall of Nanjing Museum

This paper presents the integral lifting and seismic isolation retrofit of the great hall of Nanjing Museum, a 78-year-old cultural and historical building. Due to the need for extension, the great hall of the Nanjing Museum needed to be lifted 3.0 m. The total building area for lifting was 4; 830 m(2), with a total of 161 lifting points, which made this project quite challenging and also the largest done to date. Moreover, seismic isolation retrofit was utilized to improve the seismic performance of the translocated building. Details of the integral lifting and the seismic retrofit are presented in this paper, which include (1) the load underpinning system, (2) the spatial strengthening truss system, (3) the lifting control system, and (4) the base isolation using laminated rubber isolators. The entire lifting system performed well, and the main construction was finished within 5 months. Seismic time-history analyses were further performed to evaluate the effect of the seismic isolation. It was observed that the seismic responses of the museum were significantly reduced after retrofit. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)CF.1943-5509.0000273. (C) 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.