The nearly 1.4-million-sq-ft 200 Park high-rise in San José, Calif., though only 300 ft tall, has taken Seattle’s 850-ft-tall proof of concept for SpeedCore—a novel modular steel-plate shear-wall sandwich system—to new heights.

Code-based earthquake engineering is on the verge of getting simpler, thanks to the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program’s recommendation to replace the traditional seismic hazards maps with an improved seismic hazards database.