Characteristic structural features of tall buildings in Turkey and their dynamic behavior

High-rise reinforced concrete (RC) shear wall buildings having 10 to 30 stories in metropolitan cities of Turkey are investigated under the systematic framework of Performance Based Earthquake Engineering (PBEE). A building inventory is compiled entailing blueprints of tall buildings in densely populated areas of the cities: Istanbul, Ankara, Bursa and Mersin primarily to represent the tall building stock. These buildings are thoroughly investigated via statistical methods to develop six reference building models. The recently proposed Conditional Spectrum (CS) is used as a tool to scale the selected ground motions which provided the link between the target hazard at the reference site (represents high seismicity) and structural responses. It is concluded that the high-rise RC shear wall buildings designed by Turkish engineering practice in metropolitan areas show satisfactory performance up to 475-year return period ground motions. However, the increase in ground motion hazard (e.g., 2475-year, maximum considered) may result in irreparable and severe damage states for these buildings, which may be mostly critical in terms of economic losses. The results obtained from this study can be used as reference source for future studies on several other research topics on tall buildings such as estimating cost-effectiveness and vulnerability functions of high-rise building stock in earthquake-prone regions of Turkey.