Recently in Japan, in the event of an earthquake, more investigations have been made into damage to building equipment, furniture and nonstructural components such as interior and exterior finishing and nonstructural walls rather than structural members, and there have been not a few reports on the analysis of such damage. Accompanied by this trend, seismic design guidelines for nonstructural components have been prepared under the supervision of the administrative organizations concerned and some of the guidelines have been used for actual construction.

In this paper, we survey damage to these nonstructural components and members used for construction and introduce various related guidelines which have recently been prepared to reveal their goals and other principal contents.