Direct Displacement Based Design (Based on Priestley and Kowalsky) versus Force Based Design for wall structures

A seismic design procedure is developed to enable design of concrete wall buildings in order to achieve a specified acceptable level of damages under the designed earthquake. The practice shows the simplicity of procedures based on direct displacement based design method in comparison with force-based design method. In order to explain the differences between these two methods we demonstrated their application in wall buildings of four, eight and twelve multi storey buildings. The results obtained are showing significant differences, thus we recommended one of these two methods.