The paper presents a new strategy to choose automatically the structural type, flexible or rigid, in seismic design, according to imposed structural performance criteria. The imposed performance criteria improve the lateral stiffness of the structure and keep under control the fundamental period of vibration within the admissible range, diminishing the seismic effects. The preliminary design based on above performance criteria leads to a nonlinear programming problem that is solved by an optimality criteria method. The proposed design strategy allows the integration of the conceptual design. in which the type of the structure is decided upon, into the automated structural design. Some example computations have verified the merits of the above design strategy.

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