Millions of people worldwide are in urgent need of affordable houses. According to the statistics, these people are mainly living in developing countries with a relatively high level of seismic risk and low to medium incomes. While traditional practices are unable to cope with currently high demands, large number of fatalities and wide spread damages during last earthquakes show that houses in many regions of the world are seismically vulnerable. This work aims at developing a simple and low-cost solution, inspired by good performance of traditional low-rise structures in Germany, known as...