b'R AB E HT G N I S I A RThe gods opened upwith a mountain of work Steel renaissance overnight. It created an application for steel When the devastating earthquake struckbuildings that had never Christchurch in 2011, the construction industry was still languishing in the post-GFCbeen seen before in termsdoldrums. The downturn had put a damperof the design solutions and on building projects in the commercial andthe clear advantage that industrial sectors nationwide.It took the Christchurch rebuild tosteel has to offer.kickstart the economy. Many hundreds of buildings in the Garden City were lost to theWAYNE CARSONearthquakesthey either collapsed as a direct consequence or were deemed unsafe and had to be demolished. Pre-earthquake, Christchurch was a concrete city built using locally sourced aggregate. With the exception of a few radical structural steel buildings, most multistorey buildings were constructed with a reinforced concrete moment-resisting frame structure. The earthquake was close to double the intensity that structures were designed to. Aside from some minor issues, steel-framed buildings generally performed very well.Left: Steels good performance in the Canterbury earthquakes led to a massive However, while most concrete buildingsuptake of structural steel technology in the survived the earthquake, many were severelyChristchurch rebuild, to the point where its market share rose from virtually nil to more than 80 percent of building area today.135'