Ron Klemencic, who at 6 ft, 6 in., towers over most people, may be afraid of heights but he certainly goes to great lengths to reach new ones, especially when it involves performance-based seismic design of tall buildings. It’s taken Klemencic and his team at Magnusson Klemencic Associates Inc. a dozen years to pry open the floodgates for this type of sophisticated earthquake engineering. That’s in part because there are no guidelines for PSD, which Klemencic calls “real” engineering, in U.S. codes.
At first, the seismic design community resisted PSD. Some “thought we were breaking the rules because we weren’t following the language of the code,” says Klemencic, president of the Seattle-based firm. Others feared, and still do, “that those unqualified will attempt this,” he says.