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A test program was designed to answer if it is possible to design and build a tall mass timber building with resilient performance against large earthquakes. Resilient performance was defined as to receive no structural damage under design level earthquake, and only easily repairable damage under maximum considered earthquake. The system under investigation is a full-scale 10-story mass timber building designed and constructed with many innovative systems and details including post-tensioned wood rocking wall lateral systems. Non-structural components on the building were also tested to ensure their damage in all earthquakes are repairable and will not significantly delay the functional recovery of the building after large earthquakes. The tests were conducted using multi-directional ground motion excitations ranging from frequent earthquakes to maximum considered earthquakes. The resultant dataset contains a total of 88 shake table tests and 48 white noise tests conducted on the building at the high-performance outdoor shake table facility in San Diego CA. U.S.A. Data was obtained using over 700 channels of wired sensors installed on the building during the seismic tests, presented in the form of time history of the measured responses. The tall wood building survived all excitations without detectible structural damage. This publication includes detailed documentation on the design and testing of the building, including construction drawing sets. Representative photo and video footage of the test structure during construction and testing are also included. This dataset is useful for researchers and engineers working on mass timber building design and construction in regions of high seismicity. 

Mass timber is a sustainable option for building design compared to traditional steel and concrete building systems. A shake table test of a full-scale 10-story mass timber building with post-tensioned mass timber rocking walls will be conducted as part of the NHERI TallWood project. The rocking wall system is inherently flexible and is expected to sustain large interstory drifts. Thus, the building’s vertically oriented non-structural components, which include cold-formed steel (CFS) framed exterior skin subassemblies that use platform, bypass, and spandrel framing, a stick-built glass curtain wall subassembly with mechanically captured glazing, and CFS framed interior walls, will be built with a variety of innovative details to accommodate the large drift demands. This paper will describe these innovative details and the mechanisms by which they mitigate damage, provide an overview of the shake table test protocol, and present performance predictions for the non-structural walls.