Changes in the characteristics of the structure, such as damage, have not been considered in most of the active and semi-active control methods that have been used to control and optimize the response of civil engineering structures. In this dissertation, a direct adaptive control which can deal with the existence of measurement errors and changes in structural characteristics or load conditioning is used to control the performance of structures. A Simple Adaptive Control Method (SACM) is modified to control civil structures and improve their performance. The effectiveness of the SACM is verified by several numerical examples. The SACM is used to reduce the structural response such as drift and acceleration using active and semi-active devices, and its performance is compared with that of other control methods. Also, a probabilistic indirect adaptive control method is developed and its behavior is compared to the SACM using a simple numerical example. In addition to the simplicity of the SACM implementation, the results show that SACM is very effective to reduce the response of structures with linear and non-linear behavior in comparison with other control methods.