Bracing for Disaster:
Earthquake-Resistant Architecture and Engineering in San Francisco, 1838-1933

Stephen Tobriner

Trade Paper, ISBN: 1-59714-025-2, $30.00
320 pages (8 x 10), with b&w photos, maps, and illustrations throughout

Published in collaboration with the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley

Are we prepared for the big one?

In 1906, San Francisco was destroyed not by the terrible earthquake of April 18, but by the fires that ensued.
Yet journalists and historians then-and now-have been quick to point out the speed and supposed sloppiness with which architects and engineers rebuild San Francisco after every major earthquake. The conventional wisdom holds that corruption prevents proper seismic safety in new buildings. But those presumptions are far too sweeping, according to architecture and earthquake scholar Stephen Tobriner. In fact, for the past one hundred and fifty years, architects and engineers have quietly been learning from each quake and designing newer earthquake-resistant building techniques and applying them in an ongoing effort to save San Francisco.
Bracing for Disaster is the first history of seismic engineering in San Francisco. In the language of a skilled teacher, Tobriner examines what really happened in the city's earthquakes—which buildings were damaged, which survived, and who were the unsung heroes—in a fresh appraisal of a city responding to repeated devastation.

About the Author:

Stephen Tobriner is a professor of architectural history at the University of California, Berkeley. He has written extensively on architecture and the history of reconstruction after earthquakes, and has investigated damage in earthquakes around the world with teams sponsored by the United Nations, the National Science Foundation, the Earthquake Engineering Research Center, and the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute.