Experimental Seismic Behavior of a Full-Scale Four-Story Soft-Story Wood-Frame Building with Retrofits. II: Shake Table Test Results

Abstract

Soft-story wood-frame buildings have been recognized as a disaster preparedness problem for decades. The majority of these buildings were constructed from the 1920s to the 1960s and are prone to collapse during moderate to large earthquakes due to a characteristic deficiency in strength and stiffness in their first story. In order to propose and validate retrofit methods for these at-risk buildings, a full-scale four-story soft-story wood-frame building was constructed, retrofitted, and subjected to ground motions of various intensities. The tests were conducted to validate retrofit guidelines proposed in a “Federal Emergency Management Agency’s recent soft-story seismic retrofit guideline for wood buildings” and a performance-based seismic retrofit (PBSR) methodology developed as part of the NEES-Soft project. This paper is the second in a set of companion papers and presents the full-scale shake table test results using the two new approaches. The companion paper to this paper presents the design philosophies, design details, and numerical analysis of the retrofitted building for each of the four retrofits.