To support a sustainable society, there is a high demand for developing comprehensive techniques to meet safety and performance requirements of buildings adequately while keeping the cost and material use minimum.

For this purpose, our research aims (1) to better understand the process of building collapse and its fundamental characteristics and (2) to develop design procedures to attain structural performance requirements in a more sound and reasonable way.

Special effort is being made to establish new structural design methods by exploring the reasons why the mathematics-based approaches like optimal design are hardly used in design practice and by resolving the identified difficulties one by one by pioneering innovative and original techniques.