Challenges and Problems in Performance-Based Design of Tall Buildings

Abstract

Tall building design is becoming a major area application of performance-based seismic design, as evidenced by several design guidelines and consensus documents published in the last few years. In general, performance-based earthquake engineering has brought new dimensions to tall building design, leading to a major transformation from the linear strength-based approach to the nonlinear deformation-based design practice. Consequently it becomes possible that the structural restrictions imposed on tall buildings by traditional prescriptive seismic design codes can be removed. However design guidelines have not fully matured yet and there are several issues, on which consensus has not been reached yet. On the other hand, it has to be admitted that the design profession is not prepared yet to fully implement the requirements of the performance-based design. Conceptual transformation from the prescriptive code-based design to a non-prescriptive design based on completely new features including nonlinear modeling, response-history analysis and deformation-based acceptance criteria represents a great challenge. Tall building design engineers are in need of appropriate design tools to help them, at least in the preliminary design stage, for a smooth transition to the performance-based design. The present paper is intended to identify some of the critical problems the design engineers face in the challenging new era of performance-based tall building design.