All aspects of seismic design are covered in Designers’ Guide to EN 1998-1 and 1998-5 Eurocode 8: Design provisions for earthquake resistant structures. General rules, seismic actions and rules for buildings, instead of being distributed across the Eurocodes on actions (EN 1991), design with specificmaterials (EN 1992 – 1996) or geographical design (EN 1997). This was for the convenience of countries with very low seismicity, as theymay not need to apply Eurocode 8 at all.

This present Designers’ Guide covers EN1998-1 (General Rules, seismic actions and rules for buildings) and EN1998-5 (Foundations, retaining structures, geotechnical aspects), both published by CEN at the end of 2004. These two parts of Eurocode 8 will be included, as service items, in all Eurocode packages (each package referring to a specific type of civil engineering structure and construction material) along with EN1990: Basis of Structural Design, EN1997: Geotechnical Design and the relevant parts of EN1991-1: Actions on Structures.