Int. J. Earthquake and Impact Engineering, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2020 15 Copyright © 2020 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. The response of tall buildings to far-field earthquakes and the case of a 49-storey steel building Sifat Muin and Abolhassan Astaneh-Asl* Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720-1710, USA Email: sifat.muin@berkeley.edu Email: astaneh@berkeley.edu *Corresponding author Cem Topkaya Department of Civil Engineering, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey Email: ctopkaya@metu.edu.tr Abstract: This paper investigates the seismic response of an instrumented 49-storey steel structure in San Francisco to weak, far-field, and strong, near-field ground motions. The instrumentation records obtained during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake are used to verify the accuracy of the predictions of the time-history analysis of the model. The ChiChi-002 ground motion record from the 1992 Chi-Chi earthquake in Taiwan (PGA = 0.08 g), representing a ‘weak, far-field’ earthquake and the record from the 1994 Northridge-Newhall earthquake (PGA = 0.60 g) representing a ‘strong, near-field’ earthquake were used in the study. The results showed that the force, acceleration, and displacement responses of this long-period structure to the ‘weak far-field’ ground motion are much larger than its response to the ‘strong, near-field’ ground motion. Also, the response attenuates at a slower rate for the weak, far-field earthquake, indicating the possibility of greater damage, both to structural and non-structural elements, during the earthquake. Interim seismic design recommendations are formulated to address this issue in the design of tall buildings with long periods. Keywords: structural engineering; earthquake engineering; nonlinear time-history analysis; instrumented buildings; far-field earthquakes; seismic design; tall buildings; near-field earthquakes; dynamic resonance; long-period motion; seismic performance; drift control; seismic response. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Muin, S., Astaneh-Asl, A. and Topkaya, C. (2020) ‘The response of tall buildings to far-field earthquakes and the case of a 49-storey steel building’, Int. J. Earthquake and Impact Engineering, Vol. 3, No. 1, pp.15–39. Biographical notes: Sifat Muin is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley in Prof. Khalid Mosalam’s Group. She earned her MS and PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the UC Berkeley and BS in Civil Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. Her research interest