A Soft story building is a multi-story building whereby one or more floors have windows, wide doors, large unobstructed

commercial spaces, or other openings in places where a shear wall would normally be required for stability as a matter of earthquake engineering design.[1][2] A typical soft story building is an apartment building of three or more stories located over a ground level with large openings, such as a parking garage or series of retail businesses with large windows. Buildings are classified as having a "soft story" if that level is less than 70% as stiff as the floor immediately above it, or less than 80% as stiff as the average stiffness of the three floors above it.[4] Soft story buildings are vulnerable to collapse in a moderate to severe earthquake in a phenomenon known as soft story collapse.[5] The inadequately-braced level is relatively less resistant than surrounding floors to lateral earthquake motion, so a disproportionate amount of the building's overall side-to-side drift is focused on that floor. Subject to disproportionate lateral stress, and less able to withstand the stress, the floor becomes a weak point that may suffer structural damage or complete failure, which in turn results in the collapse of the entire building.[4] A soft story building is a multi-story building with one or more floors which are soft due to structural design. These floors can be especially dangerous in earthquakes, because they cannot cope with the lateral forces caused by the swaying of the building during a quake. As a result, the soft story may fail, causing what is known as a soft story collapse. If you've ever seen pictures of massive damage after a major earthquake, you have probably seen a number of examples of soft story collapse, because it is one of the leading causes of damage to private residences. Soft story buildings are characterized by having a story which has a lot of open space. Parking garages, for example, are often soft stories, as are large retail spaces or floors with a lot of windows. While the unobstructed space of the soft story might be aesthetically or commercially desirable, it also means that there are less opportunities to install shear walls, specialized

walls which are designed to distribute lateral forces so that a building can cope with the swaying characteristic of an earthquake. If a building has a floor which is 70% less stiff than the floor above it, it is considered a soft story building. This soft story creates a major weak point in an earthquake, and since soft stories are classically associated with retail spaces and parking garages, they are often on the lower stories of a building, which means that when they collapse, they can take the whole building down with them, causing serious structural damage which may render the structure totally unusable. The most frequent failure mode of reinforced concrete (R.C.) moment frame buildings is the so called soft storey mechanism. It consists in a localisation of buildings seismic deformations and rupture in the bottom storey of the building (see Figure 1). This phenomenon is caused by the fact that the overall shear force applied to the building by an earthquake is higher at the base and by the following factors: wide openings are present in the bottom storey and not present at upper levels and weaken the structure ground level is often used for offices, shops, lobby in hotels, etc; - slender columns are present at ground level - if the lower storey is not originally weakened, it is however there that infills are the most stressed, so that they fail first and create the weak storey. The soft storey induces in columns localised deformations to which correspond brittle failures: bending combined with compression resulting in the crushing of concrete, or shear due to alternate inclined cracks resulting in the decohesion of the section.