legos+playdoe+erector sets+g.i.joes=ohh no mr. bill

you probably know these but...

i've seen laboratories and storage rooms designed to have a specific wall yield to blast pressure from within (hint: usually an exterior wall).

the ground floors in many coastal houses in the gulf and south-east are sometimes designed to have the skin (wood paneling usually) peel off when a storm surge hits it to reduce the loading on the structure.

house on legs? once the water level reaches slightly past the bottom of your home, the buoyant underside provides just enough force to snap free of the legs -booyah -houseboat?

if i remember correctly the only building to survive Tokyo's giant earthquake was FLW's Imperial Hotel, and that had to do with how the building engaged the ground and some kind slip system, that allowed the building to move when the ground moved. i think Kansai airport has something similar...

most coastal homes in florida are now built up on stilts... they have to be a certain height above sea level... i did a materials/methods project on a house in sarasota that was designed by carl abbott... the ground floor was just a garage/storage... it was a concrete frame structure with styrofoam blocks as the infill... the styrofoam is stuccoed on the outside... since the infill has no structure they will just fall away in a storm... however, the owners have to be careful too because if they clip a wall with their car while pulling out of the garage it will fall over...

they isn't what you're looking for... but i did a tower to train firemen, they had sacrificial brick walls, doors to be rammed through, doors to be pried through, roof to be busted out, etc...

lots o' plywood boards broken daily...

architphil-

I also have heard of a new trend in costal mcmansions. Apparently, the ultra-rich are now building larger-than-usual "guest houses" that are well away from the main house on the seafront (in anticipation of a rise in sea-level.) I am interested in this type of anxiety in architecture - not the singular paranoia of bunkers and a furnished root-cellar, but the generalized anxiety of a large-scale catastrophe we can't predict. It might expose "green design" as more of a remedy for anxiety than anything else.

flashpan, although not what you are looking for in the least a similar example in hurricane | typhoon affected areas is to have as you've suggested breakaway zones.

These are typical details in the vernacular, and usually found in coastal homes (with the exception of the US, where only few examples have been found). Its usually a roof overhang, verandah, terrace, steps that aren't physically connected (seperated bysmall gaps). In the event of a hurricane | typhoon the 'exposed' section takes the grunt of the damage possibly blowing|washing away leaving the rest intact.

another slightly different approach was taken by huff gooden on their "beach residence"... they basically built a box inside a box... the outside box being a slatted wood screen that protects the inside box from hurricanes...

I worked on a large HQ project down in San Fran that floated on a system of base isolators that allowed the WHOLE BUILDING so sway back and forth in an earthquake. Very cool system. All the sidewalks that circled the building were made of "breakaway concrete", essentially becoming a moat in a severe seismic event.

flashpan,
as an extension to the secondary house/anxiety architecture point - i've read that the basis for building the ponte vecchio was as an escape route for the wealthy to retreat to their villas during an uprising.

Would this be a similar philosophy to cedric price?

super-scaled velcro

some thoughts:

form ties for concrete walls
fusible links from fire dampers
sprinkler heads
floating docks
peel off visors of jockeys and race car drivers
the butt seam in a tight pair of pants
perforations on a legal pad

some skyscraper has a giant ball for vibration dampening at the top - can't remember which one though.

also Noah's Ark

for earthquake resistance in NZ, the strategy of choice is usually ductility rather than mass resistance. The ideal failure is a slow gradual failure rather than an explosive failure.

if you are researching designed failure options, you may want to look at the automotive industry, they've been doing it for a long time. they call it 'crush zones' or similar, but the idea is that failure is assumed as a given for their structural system, and they deal with controlling this failure in predictable ways, minimizing human consequences/etc., by strategies of what parts fail first, making zones of the car 'crush' first before the impact is transferred wholly to driver,etc,etc...

punky, one could also look at automobile racing and how vehicles are designed to disintegrate to dissipate the energy bound up in a vehicle.

there are a number of seismically isolated buildings built here in tokyo...which is intuitive as an approach at least...

but i also saw a program somewhere, with an engineer describing a system exactly as flashpan describes; a beam was designed to fail in a very specific way under seismic loads that could be prepared for in the construction of safety paths, etc etc. the idea was that if it failed they wanted to know where exactly and how exactly the system would fail, cuz that could be planned for. as i recall they deliberatly weakened the beam in a specific location.

The engingeer talking in the program made it sound like it was common practice, although i have never come across it here in japan, in about 50 (large-ish) buildings worth of experience...may be i just missed that discussion though.

jump,
your post that reminds me that i toured a high-rise that was under construction in san diego last year. i asked about the lateral system because I'd never seen it before. the structural engineer explained that they used a chevron braced system around the core for lateral, except that the chevrons were sleeved HSS with very special (and beautiful) pin connections. the system was designed to to fail in the plastic range (in other words they had to be replaced after a significant seismic event). this was apparently new enough that they had to provide a significant amount of engineering back-up to convince the city.
the advantage was a huge savings in steel and obviously, leasable area.