Soft-story wood-frame buildings have been recognized as a disaster preparedness problem for decades. There are tens of thousands of these multifamily three-and four-story structures throughout California and other parts of the United States. The majority were constructed between 1920 and 1970 and are prevalent in regions such as the San Francisco Bay Area in California. The NEES-Soft project was a five-university multiindustry effort that culminated in a series of full-scale soft-story

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... e building tests to validate retrofit philosophies proposed by (1) Federal Emergency Management Agency's recent soft-story seismic retrofit guideline for wood buildings and (2) a performance-based seismic retrofit (PBSR) approach developed as part of the NEES-Soft project. This paper is the first in a set of companion papers that presents the building design, retrofit objectives and designs, and full-scale shake table test results of a fourstory 370-m 2 (4,000-ft 2 ) soft-story test building. Four different retrofit designs were developed and tested at full scale, each with specified performance objectives, which were typically not the same. Three of these retrofits were stiffness or strength-based strategies and one applied supplemental damping devices in a pinned preassembled frame. This paper focuses on the building and retrofit design methodologies and specifics and the companion paper presents the experimental results of full-scale shake table tests ranging from 0.2-to 1.8-g spectral acceleration for all four retrofits. individual papers. This paper is part of the Journal of Structural Engineering, © ASCE, ISSN 0733-9445/E4014003(14)/$25.00. © ASCE E4014003-1 J. Struct. Eng. J. Struct. Eng., 2016, 142(4): E4014003 Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by University of Wisconsin-Madison on 09/29/17. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved. © ASCE E4014003-2 J. Struct. Eng. J. Struct. Eng., 2016, 142(4): E4014003 Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by University of Wisconsin-Madison on 09/29/17. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved. © ASCE E4014003-3 J. Struct. Eng. J. Struct. Eng., 2016, 142(4): E4014003 Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by University of Wisconsin-Madison on 09/29/17. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved. © ASCE E4014003-4 J. Struct. Eng. © ASCE E4014003-6 J. Struct. Eng. J. Struct. Eng., 2016, 142(4): E4014003 Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by University of Wisconsin-Madison on 09/29/17. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved. © ASCE E4014003-7 J. Struct. Eng. J. Struct. Eng., 2016, 142(4): E4014003 Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by University of Wisconsin-Madison on 09/29/17. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved. © ASCE E4014003-10 J. Struct. Eng. J. Struct. Eng., 2016, 142(4): E4014003 Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by University of Wisconsin-Madison on 09/29/17. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved. © ASCE E4014003-11 J. Struct. Eng. J. Struct. Eng., 2016, 142(4): E4014003 Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by University of Wisconsin-Madison on 09/29/17. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved. © ASCE E4014003-12 J. Struct. Eng. J. Struct. Eng., 2016, 142(4): E4014003 Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by University of Wisconsin-Madison on 09/29/17. Copyright ASCE. For personal use only; all rights reserved. © ASCE E4014003-14 J. Struct. Eng. J. Struct. Eng., 2016, 142(4): E4014003 Downloaded from ascelibrary.org by University of Wisconsin-Madison on 09/29/17.