ABSTRACT
Recent earthquakes have shown that buildings designed for life safety could sustain severe damage to structural and nonstructural elements and building contents. In the U.S., several groups have proposed performance-based seismic design approaches to produce buildings that will perform during earthquakes in conformance with the objective of design, such as immediate occupancy and collapse prevention. In the design process, the response of structural members and systems are checked against pre-established threshold levels of performance which are usually established by laboratory tests. This paper examines the influence of testing protocol on the outcome of experimental work which establishes threshold levels of structural responses to seismic loads.
