EXPERIMENTAL STUDY ON THE STRUCTURAL BEHAVIOUR OF TRADITIONAL ARCHITECTURAL COMPONENT "MASUGUMI"

Masugumi is one of the most important architectural components in old wooden Japanese buildings in terms of both structure and decoration, and its structural characteristics have been studied in recent years. The purpose of this study is to investigate the structural behaviour of masu-gumi, especially to formularize compressive creep curve in relation to the load duration. By using full-size masugumi component, which was modeled on that in national treasure building "Toshodaiji Kondo", static lateral loading test and compressive creep test for 4 years were carried out. As a result, the calculated results based on the elasto-plastic behaviour of bottom part of masugumi showed good agreement with the experimental ones, and it was estimated that the relative creep (the ratio of total deformation to initial deformation) of 100 years later would be about 5.