Robustness of Long Span Reciprocal Timber Structures

Robustness of structural systems has obtained a renewed interest due to a much more frequent use of advanced types of structures with limited redundancy and serious consequences in case of failure. The interest has also been facilitated due to recently severe structural failures such as that at Ronan Point in 1968 and the World Trade Centre towers in 2001. In order to minimise the likelihood of such disproportionate structural failures many modern building codes consider the need for robustness in structures and provides strategies and methods to obtain robustness. Therefore a structural engineer may take necessary steps to design robust structures that are insensitive to accidental circumstances. The present paper makes a discussion of such robustness issues related to the future development of reciprocal timber structures. The paper concludes that these kind of structures can have a potential as long span timber structures in real projects if they are carefully designed with respect to the overall robustness strategies.