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Timisoara is a growing city in the western part of Romania, in a seismic area, with a lot of masonry buildings with historical and cultural value, with interesting structural elements such as vaults, arches, slabs, walls, that were affected by earthquakes, subsidence of foundations, negative human actions or lack of interventions. Masonry historical structures in Banat seismic area present particular failure mechanisms, so there is a need for new, modern, fast, easy-to-apply and reversible consolidation methods. With this type of methods is possible to assure the local and global resistance, ductility, stability and rigidity for historical buildings. This article shows the consolidation methods that were applied on the buildings Sf. Gheorghe 3 and 4, in the historical centre of Timisoara, on masonry structures with historical value. The solutions that were applied are using new, innovative fibre-reinforced composite materials, in order to repair the existing damages and prevent further ones. The consolidation solutions with these new composite materials reduce the buildings vulnerability and present the advantage of being fast and easy to be executed.

Historic buildings are complex structures in which all the composing elements work together. Studies of heritage structures after seismic events have shown that timber roof structures strongly influence the seismic response of masonry structures, being able to reduce or enhance the out-of-plane displacement of the structure. Starting from these observations, three different types of roof structures, from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, were introduced in the finite-element simulation software SCIA Engineer. The roof structures were subsequently placed on the same eighteenth-century masonry building with a ground floor and two upper floors, respecting its geometric features. Simulations were performed considering successively rigid, hinged or sliding connections between the roof and the masonry structure. At the same time, the traditionally crafted joints of the roof structures were consecutively modelled as hinged, rigid and semi-rigid (determined using three different methods). Ultimately, the top horizontal displacement, inter-storey drift and damage level of the masonry structure were compared. The main aims of this study were to observe if roof structures have an influence on the seismic behaviour of masonry buildings and to determine if selected parameters suffer any changes depending on the roof structure type, the roof–wall connections and joints’ axial stiffness.

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Extreme actions represent a high risk for buildings belonging to historic urban areas and archaeological sites. Because of the conformation of the buildings, the low quality of used materials and the current state of conservation, these buildings tend to be very vulnerable to horizontal forces generated during earthquakes and terrorist attacks. This article analyses the mechanisms caused by extreme actions that are capable to generate a considerable degree of damage or even collapse of international cultural heritage buildings from historic urban centers and sites.

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