Several European countries are likely to experience extensive damage following major earthquakes due to high vulnerability and exposure, associated with the age of the built environment and the presence of densely populated areas, respectively. For these reasons, largescale seismic risk assessment has a pivotal role. Given the large number of buildings to be assessed, indirect methods are usually the preferred option. However, simplified methodologies for reinforced concrete buildings have been recently developed, predominantly using non-linear time history analyses, and have shown to be a suitable alternative to indirect approaches. Simplified methodologies represent buildings as multi-degrees-of-freedom "sticklike" models, with the inter-storey behaviour modelled through an equivalent spring. These methodologies considerably reduce the computational effort yet achieving comparable accuracy with rigorous analyses. A major limitation of these methodologies is that they are applicable only to shear-type buildings, regular both in plan and in elevation. Aimed at overcoming this gap, the present work proposes a simplified method applicable to both regular and irregular reinforced concrete buildings. More specifically, each column is modelled separately with two uncoupled springs, one in each principal direction, to capture the torsional behaviour while retaining high computational efficiency. The proposed method is applied to a case study to demonstrate its capabilities.
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