The biggest and the most secured building in world, at least in terms of seismic attacks or in laymen terms, earthquakes is the brand new international terminal at Istanbul’s Sabiha Gökçen Airport which is now operational.

The foundations of this state of the art airport aren’t in based in the ground but have been designed to be integrated in more than 300 isolators that have developed to sway from side to side in the event of an earthquake. The principle behind this marvelous innovation is that, the entire building will move as an entire single unit, instead of parts of the building bearing the brunt of the earthquake, that would put more stress on the building and might even lead to its destruction.

During an earthquake, a building is shaken in a lateral motion that makes them sway in back and forth and puts tremendous amount of stress on the frame of the building. This in turn significantly puts the building at a risk of crashing down on itself and cause a high rate of casualties. However, the isolators are designed to slow the momentum of the building, thus giving the building a more stable momentum thereby preventing the destruction of the building.

Turkey learnt its lesson from the 7.4 magnitude earthquake that struck the country in the year 1999 and claimed the lives of 19,000 people along with billions of dollars in structural damage. Due to the fact that, the North Anatolian Fault is located less than 15 miles from Istanbul, it makes the city more prone to another high magnitude earthquake.

According to Atila Zekioglu (Engineer, Arup),

“What an isolation system does is that it enables the building to move through large displacements in unison, and in doing that, you absorb earthquake energy. What we have done over the years is that there are many tests going around the globe in terms of shake tables, testing labs, and what we do is we take that data… test the ability of our seismic simulation software.”

Via Wired.