SUMMARYMost seismic design codes accept heavy damages to buildings in case of large earthquakes, provided that they are prevented against collapse. However, this leads to unacceptable consequences, such as very large volume of the required reconstruction works, in large populated cities. One way to get rid of these adverse consequences is using the idea of combining rocking/seesaw motion of the building's structure and energy dissipation at base level to create buildings easily repairable even after a large earthquake. In the present study, this idea has been employed for designing steel buildings with seesaw motion capability by using a central massive column at ground floor, with elastic behavior and other columns at that floor quipped with friction dampers. A set of buildings has been designed, once based on the conventional provisions and once by using the suggested structural system. Then, a set of nonlinear time history analyses have been performed on all buildings by using selected earthquake records. Results show that the suggested structural system has reliable seismic behavior, so that large deformations happen only in columns at ground floor which have telescopic motion because of the friction dampers, as such, these buildings can be easily repaired even after large earthquakes.