Ancient architecture that defies earthquakes

Conc is quite shit in tension and great in compression (there's rather more to it than that). Avoiding too many technical terms: a beam ("member" of a structure) under normal loading is in compression on the top and tension on the bottom. Push down hard enough on a length of Lego and it will split on its underside.

Steel is rather good at tension, So you might put steel at the bottom of the conc member - imagine the letter C stretched vertically to roughly match the member length and then rotated 90 degrees anti clockwise so it actually fits. The steel reinforces the member, hence steel reinforced conc. Slabs etc can use mesh instead of C shaped strips.

Now you can also pull another rather neat trick with conc n steel: Compress the conc member with steel. Embed threaded rod(s) within the steel and wack on some washers to spread the load and some nuts. Tighten the nuts at a suitable point in the conc's set and curing process. This is pre-stressed conc and it's a bit useful. However you have now locked up an enormous amount of potential energy within the conc. Do make sure it isn't allowed to explode.

Wood is another wondrous material. It is made up of fibres and comes in an incredible number of examples with a huge range of properties. Think balsa vs bamboo vs oak vs pine etc. We can also make wood into all sorts of derived materials too eg plywood and chipboard.

I've barely touched on the properties of all this stuff. I once spent two years studying Civ Eng and that's just to get the basics in place - I'm no civil engineer per se but I have built some small structures that work safely.

You describe a material (re-conc) surviving something but that's not the real issue. A structure is really what we want to survive - actually we want us to survive but ideally both survive!

So what's best to deal with an earthquake? That's a job for a Struct Eng and not a casual comment on HN. However we can look into it a bit.

What stresses and strains are placed on a structure in an earthquake? There will be a huge amount of vibration for starters - wood is far better than brittle old conc with soaking up that sort of loading (in general). How is our structure formed? Is it a single box or pin jointed boxes?

Building materials in general have a vast number of properties, many of which the casual commenter is not aware of. For example, with concrete you can make a canoe or the Three Gorges dam or a station platform or the thing that stops my home clothesline from falling over.