In designing passively vibration-controlled buildings, it is difficult for the designers to evaluate the response with various types of dampers, especially the dampers cannot be distributed uniformly because of architectural limitations. Trial-and-error-based design with time history analyses does not necessarily promote understanding the relationship between damper layout and their effects. The present paper proposes simplified response estimation methods for passively vibration-controlled multistory buildings with elasto-plastic damper and visco-elastic damper systems including non uniform distributions. In these methods various equivalent linearization techniques are introduced, and their accuracies are compared with time-history analyses.
