Middle stories in some SRC and RC buildings collapsed in the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Judging from the complete crash of the collapsed story, the building would be collapsed because it could not sustain the dead load. In this study, the collapse caused by shear failure is termed as "shear collapse" and a method of judging the collapse caused by shear was proposed. Experiments of SRC and RC column were also performed to verify the validity of the proposed method. Finally the possibility of collapse of SRC and RC buildings failed by Kobe Earthquake were judged by the proposed method and the results were compared with the real damage of the buildings.
