Recent tall buildings tend to have unconventional shapes as a prevailing, which is effective for suppressing across-wind responses. Suppression of across-wind responses is a major factor in tall building projects, and the so called aerodynamic modification method is comprehensively used. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the pressure fluctuations on tapered and setback tall buildings, including peak pressures, power spectra and coherences through the synchronous multi-pressure sensing system techniques. And flow measurements around the models were conducted to investigate the condition of vortex shedding. The results show that by tapering and setback, different distributions of mean pressure coefficients at leeward surface were found, which is caused by the geometric characteristics of the models. And the power spectra of wind pressures at sideward surface become wideband and the peak frequencies are different depending on heights, which makes the correlation near the Strouhal component low or even negative. The differences in shedding frequencies were also confirmed by the flow fields around the models.

For most of recent tall buildings, one characteristic is that their building shapes vary with height such as taper and setback, and this implies that the distribution of their structural components may also vary with height. Because of these structural variations, although the sectional shapes of these buildings are symmetric, it is difficult to say whether or not they are structurally symmetric. The acceleration responses of structurally asymmetric tall buildings are larger than those of non-eccentric buildings, thus raising the possibility of problems during strong winds and typhoons. This paper describes wind tunnel tests carried out using building models with height variations and acceleration response analyses, and discusses the resulting response characteristics. For tapered and setback buildings, although the across-wind accelerations are larger than those of a square building, the total root-mean-square accelerations remain small because of smaller along-wind and torsional rms accelerations. And it was found that the effects of statistical couplings between along-wind force and other two forces are negligible.