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A major earthquake of magnitude 7.2 on the Richter scale shook the southern region of Romania on March 4, 1977. Bucharest, the Capital of the Socialist Republic of Romania with a population of 2,000,000 people, was the ur¬ban center hit hardest by the shock. As a result, about 1,300 people died there, 34,000 families were left homeless, 32,000 flats were heavily damaged, 35 multistory re¬inforced concrete buildings completely collapsed, and mi¬nor structural damage and serious nonstructural damage was left behind to be seen in a great number of buildings. A rich variety of modern reinforced concrete structures exist in Bucharest. The state of the art of the earthquake engineering in Romania is quite up to date. The ground motion of the March 4, 1977 shock was recorded in Buch¬arest by a strong-motion accelerograph and a seismoscope. A microzone map was available for the City area, for some years.' A modern code for earthquake resistant design and construction was in effect,' and, there existed a vast, state operated, building industry in the Country. Presence of all the above mentioned conditions rendered the earthquake stricken Romania into a unique test site. The purpose of this article is to report some first hand ob¬servations made by the writer on the performance of vari¬ous types of reinforced concrete buildings in Bucharest during the March 4, 1977 earthquake. Interpreting the ob¬served behavior of structures and the measured ground motions, certain general conclusions are reached with re¬spect to the earthquake performances of multistory pre-fabricated panel construction, multistory monolithic frame buildings, truss bracing of frames, and heavy masonary partitions.