If you had flight times between airports but no map, what shape could you recover?
I built Time / Space to explore that question. It starts with airports scattered randomly in three dimensions, then moves them to make the distances between connected airports match their flight times. No latitude, longitude, or assumed sphere is supplied to the optimizer.
During an earthquake, a building frame sways and its floors move relative to one another. A wall inside the frame may be intentionally detached, with enough clearance for the frame to move without pushing on it.
That separation matters even more when the wall is reinforced concrete, such as an insulated concrete form (ICF) wall, rather than a lightweight partition. If the frame closes the clearance and contacts the wall, the two begin interacting and both can be damaged.
The design challenge is to size this seismic gap and connect the wall to the columns in a way that keeps the wall stable while still allowing the frame to move independently. The wall needs support without unintentionally becoming part of the building's earthquake-resisting system.
I built this interactive visualization to make the gap-closing problem easier to see and to show how the beams and columns move relative to the detached wall.