Catastrophic building collapse can have many causes, but the outcome is all too familiar; a loss of lives and the destruction of infrastructure that can have a long lasting effect on a community.
Current guidelines suggest extensive structural connectivity within a building is the best way to prevent disaster. This allows for a redistribution of weight should part of a structure be damaged. But in certain circumstances, this interconnectedness can be a building's downfall. With a large enough initial failure, collapsing parts of the building can pull down the rest of the connected structure.
Read the paper: Arresting failure propagation in buildings through collapse isolation
They call it hierarchy-based collapse isolation, and they tested their theory using an experiment two storeys high.