Tiered Approach to Performance-Based Seismic Design of Wood Frame Buildings

Abstract

Performance-based seismic design of steel and concrete buildings has been evolving for more than a decade. For woodframe buildings, however, development is behind these other structural materials primarily due to the nature of the woodframe construction industry and the prescriptive nature of wood building design. Several proposals for performance-based seismic design of woodframe buildings are beginning to emerge, including both direct displacement design and loss-based design procedures. In this paper, three methods for performance-based seismic design are briefly summarized and their use is illustrated on a simple building. These include: (1) direct displacement design, (2) nonlinear time history analysis, and (3) loss-based seismic design. The first two methods focus on inter-story drift, while the third focuses on financial losses. The same building was designed using each of the three approaches. Results are compared and contrasted for each of the methods.