The tallest building in Taiwan, half a kilometer high, survived the big quake just fine - in part thanks to a 'tuned mass damper'.
It's a 660-tonne steel sphere hanging from wires: a pendulum designed to reduce quake vibrations by 40%. It's yellow and it hangs from the 92nd to the 87th floors, visible from inside the building. On 8 August 2015, strong winds from Typhoon Soudelor made it swing by 100 centimeters. I don't know how much it swayed during the quake.
It's inspired a popular mascot in Taiwan, called Damper Baby. I'll show you the actual steel sphere, and then Damper Baby.
@ComradeGibbon - Your calculation seems accurate! Wikipedia writes:
"Its ball, the largest damper ball in the world, consists of 41 circular steel plates of varying diameters, each 125 mm (4.92 in) thick, welded together to form a 5.5-meter-diameter (18 ft) ball."
Maybe the slight discrepancy - 18 feet versus your 17.4 feet - comes from the fact that it's not really a sphere: it's a stack of plates, so there's some "missing steel" compared to a sphere of the same diameter.
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