Soft stories constitute a major reason for building collapses during severe earthquakes. The present study investigates a solution for the seismic upgrade of existing reinforced (RC) concrete frames with open first story and masonry infills at the upper stories. It combines the addition of hysteretic dampers with the strengthening of the columns of the first story. The energy-based design procedure put forth provides the strength, stiffness and energy dissipation capacity required for the dampers so that the overall structure can endure the design earthquake without exceeding a prescribed maximum drift at the first story. Finally, using the code for Inelastic Dynamic Analysis of Structures (IDARC-2D), non-linear dynamic analyses are carried out to evaluate the seismic performance of the retrofitted structures and to validate the proposed procedure, the results obtained show that the proposed solution is feasible
