The Whittier Narrows, California Earthquake of October 1, 1987—Response of a Tall Masonry Building

The Hilton Hotel in Whittier, California is an eight story reinforced hollow unit concrete masonry building. It experienced a peak ground acceleration of approximately sixty percent gravity without visible structural damage. This paper performs an analysis of the building from two perspectives. The first is a structural engineering design perspective using the structural mechanics assumptions consistent with the new strength design criteria for hollow unit shear walls in the 1988 UBC and a response spectra analysis. The second perspective is based on a nonlinear lumped parameter time history model and a step-by-step time history analysis.