**Author details**

of the component of the earthquake in Z-direction. Based on these results it was demonstrated the structural asymmetry of the assessed building since the center of mass does not coincide with the center of rigidity, determining that the greatest torsional moments are on outer

Interstorey drifts of *RB* building obtained from 2D and 3D nonlinear dynamic analysis, it was noted that 2D model provided greater drifts values than the 3D model drifts. This is a logical and expected result since the 3D dynamic analysis considers the rigid diaphragm, which

Inelastic static analysis is more reliable than linear methods in the prediction of the parameters of response of buildings, although this method has no response on the effects of higher modes of vibration. A more reliable and sophisticated method is the 2D no linear dynamic analysis, where it can be better determined the likely behavior of the building in response to the earthquake. However, the uncertainties associated with the definition of accelerograms used in these analysis and properties of coplanar structural models can be reduced with the implementation of the dynamic 3D analysis because there are considered factors associated with structural redundancy and are used more actual values in terms of rigidity of resistant

The Quadrants Method presented in this paper is suitable for rapid and reliable evaluation of structures, with a low calculation effort. The cases studied demonstrated that the method can provide a reliable criterion to predict if any structure would have an inadequate seismic performance based on the results of static non-linear analysis. Results obtained from dynamic non-linear analysis confirmed the results obtained from the application of the Quadrants

Despite the plan irregularity of the studied building, the Quadrants Method was suitably in order to predict that its lateral stiffness was not enough. Dynamics analysis confirmed this feature, then the cross sections of this building was resizing and details of the confinement were improved in order to meet the regulations of the current version of the Venezuelan seismic code. The seismic performance of the new designed building was tested with the Quadrants Method and dynamic analysis, showing that the resizing structure met all the Limit

Authors wish to acknowledge to the Scientific and humanistic Council of Lisandro Alvarado University for the financial support of the research in the field of non-regular structures. Also the authors would highlight the role of the International Center of Numerical Methods for

introduces restrictions to the number of degrees of freedom in the structure.

298 Engineering Seismology, Geotechnical and Structural Earthquake Engineering

columns and inner corners.

structural lines.

Method.

States used in this research.

**Acknowledgements**

Engineering in the collaborative research.

Juan Carlos Vielma1\*, Alex H. Barbat2 , Ronald Ugel1 and Reyes Indira Herrera1

\*Address all correspondence to: jcvielma@ucla.edu.ve

1 Structural Engineering Department, School of Civil Engineering, Lisandro Alvarado Uni‐ versity, Venezuela

2 Department of Strength of Materials and Structural Analysis in Engineering, Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain
