1st Croatian Conference on Earthquake Engineering 1CroCEE 2021

Available evidence classifies traditional earth architecture as Croatia’s treasure as they embody authenticity and uniqueness. Thereunto, Baranja’s earth houses are presented as the best realizations of traditional Croatian rural architecture. Although present in Croatia, earth houses are often relinquished, damaged, or in an adverse state. The Act on Protection and Preservation of Cultural Goods defines the traditional earth house as an immovable cultural good which, as such, needs to be protected from disappearing. Nevertheless, until today there has been no conducted research on traditional Croatian earth architecture to assess their behaviour and performance. Croatia is situated in an earthquake-prone area, thus the design of all load-bearing structures has to be done in accordance with standards from the HRN EN 1998 series. In this paper, the seismic behaviour and dynamic properties of a typical Croatian earth house were investigated. The paper consists of three main parts. The first part is dedicated to the description of the geometry and materials of a typical traditional Croatian house. The second part presents numerical model developed using the ANSYS software package, which allowed assessment of the dynamic properties and seismic capacity of the house. The third and last part of the paper provides a discussion on results considering the nonlinear behaviour of the traditional earth house.