Vulnerability Assessment of All Saints’ Church - a
Unique Heritage Building in Bengaluru
Saugat Rijal
1
, Suraj George Kottakat
2
and S. Raghunath
3
1-3
BMS College of Engineering/Civil Department, Bengaluru, India
Email: {srijal303, surajgeorgek28}@gmail.com, raghu.civ@bmsce.ac.in
Abstract—Increasing infrastructure projects in mega-cities are leading to greater vulnerability
of heritage structures situated in the proximity. Heavy construction activities such as
tunnelling, pile driving, deep excavation, movement of heavy vehicles, deep foundation, etc., are
common in such projects. A combination of these activities leads to unintended distress in
heritage structures, especially unreinforced masonry buildings. It is important to assess the
structural health and vulnerability of such buildings. This would help in deciding on
conservation strategies, including possible retrofitting of the structure. Bengaluru is one such
mega-city which is bestowed with numerous heritage buildings, many of which are in proximity
to the on-going metro project. All Saints’ church is one such unique single-storied unreinforced
masonry building neighbouring one of the underground metro stations proposed. The church
was designed by Robert Fellowes Chisholm, a legend in architecture and pioneer of the Indo-
Saracenic style, about 150 years ago. Its structural and architectural uniqueness is certainly
worthy to be conserved. This paper brings out the details of the attempt made to assess the
vulnerability of this structure due to possible lateral loads caused by ground motions induced
by construction activities. An investigation has been made to collect the structural details
required to model and analyse the structure. An attempt has been made to identify the regions
in the load-bearing elements of the building which could experience higher levels of stresses due
to lateral loads, using general purpose finite element software. During the study, it is observed
that there are certain unique structural elements that have been robustly configured into the
architectural features and thus rendered the building healthy despite its age. It is concluded
that these unique structural elements need to be carefully monitored and protected to conserve
the heritage building.
Index Terms— vulnerability assessment, heritage building, unreinforced masonry, dynamic
analysis.
I. INTRODUCTION
Bengaluru, or Bangalore as it is popularly known, is the capital city of the southern state of Karnataka in India. It
is popularly called the “Silicon Valley of India” due to its crucial role in the Indian IT sector and has a
metropolitan population of around 110 lakhs. [1] To address the traffic woes of this bustling city, the Bengaluru
metro project “Namma Metro” was started in 2011. There is an East-West Corridor which is 18.10km long and a
North-South corridor which is 24.20km long in the existing Phase I of the project. In the upcoming Phase – II of
Namma Metro, there is an underground tunnel and a station being constructed within 100m of the heritage All
Saints’ Church. Like most heritage buildings in Bengaluru, this building is also constructed using stone and brick
Grenze ID: 01.GIJET.8.1.16
© Grenze Scientific Society, 2022
Grenze International Journal of Engineering and Technology, Jan Issue