"You're putting a building through the number of quakes it will never, ever experience unless it's around for 5,000 years," says Thomas Robinson, founding principal of Lever Architecture, a Portland, Oregon, firm that helped design the TallWood structure. (Credit: Sandy Huffaker/Bloomberg)

(Bloomberg) — One sunny morning last month, an earthquake jolted northeast San Diego. Minutes later, another temblor hit, causing a 10-story wood building to sway.

The quakes, though, were triggered by a computer and the shaking was confined to a 1,000-square-foot platform on which the building — a full-size test model — stood.

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