Abstract
The school building suffered from a great deal of damage during the 2007 Chuetsu-Oki Earthquake. The previous study revealed that the anticipated design failure modes of most of the columns of the building were flexure although most of them actually failed in shear. In order to study the reason a parametric study was also conducted and it was concluded that the diagonal crack generated from cut off point caused shear failure in these columns. In this study static loading tests were conducted varying the length of cut off bars and the presence of spandrel walls. Main conclusions were as follows; (1)The deformation capacity of a column with cut off bars degraded tremendously on condition that the yielding hinge location was cut off point and the inclination angle of diagonal cracks generated from the cut off point was approximately 50 degree. (2)The effect of presence of spandrel walls on deformation capacities was small.
