Optimum Seismic Design of Linear Shear Buildings

An iteration procedure is described for the optimum design of shear buildings that behave linearly and have infinitely stiff and sufficiently strong beams. The design spectrum is assumed given. The procedure involves a modal analysis in each cycle. It converges rapidly if the design velocity spectrum increases with period in the neighborhood of the fundamental period and it can be adapted to cases in which the spectrum decreases in this range. The quid of the proposed approach is to insure at least one active restriction per story.