These Seismic Design Guidelines for Tall Buildings present a recommended alternative to the prescriptive procedures for seismic design of buildings contained in the ASCE 7 standard and the International Building Code (IBC). The intended audience includes structural engineers and building officials engaged in seismic design and review of tall buildings. Properly executed, these Guidelines are intended to result in buildings that are capable of reliably achieving the seismic performance objectives intended by ASCE 7, and in some aspects, and where specifically noted, somewhat superior performance to such objectives. Individual users may adapt and modify these Guidelines to serve as the basis for designs intended to achieve higher seismic performance objectives than specifically intended herein.

The Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center published a first edition of these Guidelines in 2010 in response to the growing use of alternative performance-based approaches for seismic design of tall buildings. Major innovations introduced in that volume included: use of Service-Level Earthquake (SLE) shaking to evaluate building response to frequent earthquakes coupled with a specific collapse-resistance evaluation for Maximum Considered Earthquake (MCER) shaking, use of nonlinear dynamic analysis; explicit evaluation of global, system-based performance criteria in addition to individual element or member-based criteria; introduction of the concept of critical and non-critical elements; and explicit evaluation of cladding adequacy for MCER demands.  Read More >