The intention of this Manual is to provide seismic design application rules for the majority of low to medium rise steel and concrete buildings falling within the scope of EN 1998 Design of structures for earthquake resistance (EC8), for all levels of seismicity. A more comprehensive definition of the buildings falling within the Manual’s scope is provided in Section 1.3. The Manual may still be useful for some aspects of the preliminary design of a wider range of buildings, for example high rise buildings or buildings required for a post-earthquake emergency, but for detailed design, engineers will need to refer to EC8.
Users of the Manual are not expected to have prior knowledge of EC8, but must be suitably qualified and experienced engineers, since the Manual is not intended to be a primer on earthquake engineering. The integrity of a building under seismic loading depends not only on the performance of its superstructure but is also very strongly dependent on the behavior of its foundations and supporting soils; therefore suitably qualified and experienced geotechnical engineers, as well as structural engineers, need to be involved. Users must also have some experience of the Eurocode set of standards, since use of other Eurocodes, in addition to EC8, is necessary to conform to EC8’s requirements.
The aim of Chapters 4 to 15 is to set out the minimum requirements of EC8 for buildings within the scope of the Manual. These minimum requirements are set in a regular typeface (the same as this sentence). In addition, the Manual provides some supplementary recommendations and guidance in cases where EC8 does not provide complete application rules for practical design purposes, or where it is considered that the minimum requirements of EC8 may need to be supplemented. These additional recommendations are set in italic typeface and start with the phrase ‘It is recommended that.....’ Additional explanatory material not appearing in EC8 is also included in the Manual; it is intended to give the background to the design rules and is also set in italic typeface, starting with the phrase ‘It may be observed that...’.