A number of wooden houses have been destroyed under earthquake. From a structural viewpoint, the authors developed simplified seismic shelter which is consisting of timber grid wall with half-lap joint. The concept of this shelter is saving securing space even if housing is collapsed. Although the stiffness of this shelter is smaller than the conventional grid shear wall for seismic retrofit, this shelter has ability of ductile and energy absorption by embedding at a joint. In this paper, these basic characteristics are verified by experiments and numerical analysis.
