Building Culture and Seismic Assessment of a Rammed Earth Village in the Chicamocha Canyon, Colombia

The municipality of Cepitá is located in the central eastern area of Colombia, within the outstanding landscape of the Chicamocha Canyon. The building tradition of Cepitá is based on the use of tapia pisada (rammed earth), which is actually used for almost all the buildings that form the urban fabric. The urban, architectural, and construction features maintain the morphological characters of the Spanish colonial heritage. This paper describes the results of research on the building culture and the seismic vulnerability of the municipality of Cepitá conducted collaboratively by the Department of Architecture at the University of Florence and the School of Engineering at Universidad Industrial de Santander. The first part of the paper identifies and classifies traditional building techniques and processes that use earth and wood as materials, according to construction models of colonial origin. Codifying the building practices of this area, which are becoming obsolete in the collective imagination with the recent introduction of modern materials, attests to the wisdom of the master builders refined over centuries and represents the availability of technical support for the conservation and maintenance of the existing heritage. In the second part of the paper, a quick and essential assessment method for the analysis of seismic vulnerability is illustrated and applied on three buildings selected as case studies.