ABSTRACT
Concrete shell structures have shown their good performance during earthquakes, but their disasterresistant potential has rarely been highlighted or researched. Felix Candela designed and built a series of emblematic concrete shell structures in and around Mexico City during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1985 several iconic shell structures constructed and designed by Candela in Mexico City were rocked by a cataclysmic moment magnitude 8.1 earthquake and a large aftershock but survived without reports of collapse or cracking. He had designed the church in one afternoon, drawn up the plans in a week and the structure was calculated during construction. Candela's design was revolutionary, but did great justice to the gothic concept of spanning large open spaces with the minimum amount of materials. His shell structures in Mexico City and their categorization based on seismic hazard maps.
