DETAILED EVALUATION OF AN EXISTING REINFORCED CONCRETE BUILDING DAMAGED UNDER ITS OWN WEIGHT Bayraktar, Atilla M.Sc., Department of Civil Engineering Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Ahmet Yakut May 2011, 130 pages A significant part of the Turkey&rsquo / s building inventory consists of reinforced concrete frame structures. In addition to that a big part of the existing building inventory in Turkey shows insufficiency in seismic performance damage or failure of structures under their own loads has also been observed. The failure of Z&uuml / mr&uuml / t Apartment building that occurred in 2004 in Konya and resulted in the death of 92 people brings the necessity of researches on robustness and reserve capacities of the buildings under gravity loading to front. In the context of this thesis, the event in Konya that has resulted in the crushing of four columns in Dostlar Building Complex is studied. After the occurrence of the event, the building was visited, plans of existing condition were prepared and pre-assessment was performed. Original plans of the building, strength test results of the concrete samples and reinforcement detection results were obtained. The reasons behind the crushing of the columns have been investigated through a series of analyses based on a number of possible hypotheses. After modeling the building in SAP2000 program, demand-capacity ratios are calculated. Nonlinear behavior of the structure is determined by incremental static pushover analysis and the seismic performance of the building is evaluated by nonlinear procedure described in 2007 Turkish Earthquake Code. To determine the nonlinear behavior under gravity loading and collapse mechanism, incremental vertical pushover analysis is performed.