On the potential of using the Mexican National Catalogue of Historical Monuments for assessing the seismic vulnerability of existing buildings: a proof-of-concept study

Abstract

The possibility of characterising an existing building based on a limited set of attributes would permit building a semantical, graphical or even conceptual model that could serve as a reference for analytical purposes. Providing that the intent of the analysis and the evaluation procedures are consistent with each other and coherent with the description, it is plausible to assume that the data required to build such a conceptual model could be obtained by resorting, for example, to an ad-hoc survey composed of a set of pre-selected parameters. In the context of a growing interest in preserving Mexican cultural heritage, there has been a continuous effort to catalogue the buildings that, under the corresponding legal definition, are considered historical monuments; in this case, all constructions dated from the early 16th century until 1900. This catalogue has allowed putting together a comprehensive database of the Mexican architectonic heritage. Among other applications, this catalogue has been used to support intervention decision making, particularly in the sequence of recent seismic events in Mexico. Much of the information included in the current version of the catalogue is related to the buildings’ structural characteristics, making it pertinent to discuss the suitability of using these data for feeding simplified vulnerability assessment methodologies. With this in view, the present paper explores and discusses the feasibility of a transversal use of an index-based seismic vulnerability assessment approach for façade walls together with the Mexican National Catalogue of Historical Monuments. For such, the methodology—a pre-established vulnerability assessment approach for façade walls—was applied to a set of representative masonry buildings damaged by the 2017 Puebla earthquake. Furthermore, this paper offers a proposal for enhancing the existing survey to obtain data that would permit to include a semi-quantitative index for vulnerability as a part of the current catalogue works.