Abstract: “Recently, an increasing trend of passive and lowenergy buildings transferring from non-earthquake prone to earthquake-prone regions has thrown out the question about the seismic safety of such buildings. The paper describes two most commonly used structural details of energy efficient construction, which could be critical from the point of view of earthquake resistance: i) Foundation of a building on thermal insulation (TI) layers and ii) Fixing of precast balcony element without thermal bridge. The first part of the paper describes the problematics of founding of a building on TI and presents the authors’ proposal of seismic fuse assembled out of TI boards and waterproofing (foil) layers, which have been commonly used under the RC foundation slabs of passive buildings. The main idea is to reduce the seismic forces on the superstructure by allowing controlled lateral sliding between the individual layers of the TI boards. The feasibility of the proposed solution has been analysed by me”

Keywords: earthquake response, extruded polystyrene (XPS), foundations on thermal insulation layer, low-energy buildings, seismic analysis, thermal bridge, cantilever structures, precast elements