CASE STUDY OF A 40-STOREY BUCKLING-RESTRAINED BRACED FRAME BUILDING LOCATED IN LOS ANGELES

Simpson Gumpertz & Heger has prepared two prototypical designs for a 40-storey buckling-restrained braced steel-framed office building located at a generic site in Los Angeles, CA. One of these designs conforms in all respects. except height limits with the design criteria contained in the 2007 California Building Code and ASCE 7.05 Standard for Minimum Design Loads for Buildings and Other Structures. The second design has been conducted using a performance-based approach generally based on the criteria contained in guidelines published by the Los Angeles Tall Buildings Council. The performance-based design incorporates fewer bays of bracing and lighter members than the code-based design, but is intended to provide performance at least equivalent to that anticipated for code-designed buildings. The purpose of this work was to permit study of the performance capability of buildings designed to alternative criteria. This work was performed in support and under funding provided by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center's Tall Buildings Initiative. Copyright (c) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.