The world largest three-dimensional earthquake simulator, E-Defense, has been operated and available for shake table tests since January 2005. A five-year national project on seismic safety of urban areas, so-called DaiDaiToku project, started from 2002 in Japan. As a part of the project, seismic performance of reinforced concrete (RC) buildings were investigated through full-scale shake table tests at E-Defense in 2005 and 2006. The second phase tests were conducted for two three-story school buildings from September to November 2006. One was a bare RC specimen simulating an old and non-ductile school building with short columns, while the other was a retrofit specimen, which was constructed in the same design and strengthened with attached steel braces. The two specimens were constructed on the concrete flat slab base with construction joint simulating spread foundation, where sway and uplifting behavior would occur in seismic response of the shake table test. An obvious low level of input and damage to the building structures was verified experimentally, which was owing to the base slip behavior under an extreme earthquake motion. The plan, procedure and results of the full-scale shake table test on the first bare RC specimen are reported in this paper.
