Post-World War II Italian school buildings: typical and specific seismic vulnerabilities

Structures belonging to the same type and built in the same period may share similar geometrical and spatial characteristics. When these features also affect the seismic response of the buildings, they are referred to as typical seismic vulnerabilities. When a building presents one or more of these typical vulnerabilities, some general and qualitative considerations on its seismic behaviour can be made a priori, considering their actual influence on the seismic behaviour of other similar cases. In this work, we propose and apply a specific procedure based on a priori considerations to a specific building type: the post-World War II Italian Schools. To this purpose, we first improved our knowledge about this type of building, pointing out typical and specific seismic vulnerabilities by studying the standard architectural principles suggested by the main manuals and laws of that time. Then, in order to find how these typological features affect the global seismic behaviour of the examined structures, we analysed a real case study representative of the entire building type. Pushover and Nonlinear Dynamic analyses have been carried out, considering four different models, representing three different configurations that may result from different combinations of the most significant typical vulnerabilities.