ABSTRACT
The huge demand on space arising from human activities in a modern city can only be met by the construction of multi-story buildings which can multiply many times the usable area of the land. The role of the engineering profession is to design viable and safe structural systems for transferring horizontal as well as vertical loadings acting on the buildings to the ground. The super-structure can be treated as a cantilever with the base either fixed firmly or restrained by springs representing the stiffnesses of the sub-structure and the forces at the base of the super-structure can be computed by any appropriate method. Most of the methods for the analysis of the superstructure are based on the assumption that the slab at each floor level can be treated as a rigid diaphragm which has a high in-plane rigidity but a negligible bending stiffness, and, therefore, the whole structure is only allowed to move rigidly in the horizontal plane.
