Recent severe earthquakes worldwide have put emphasis on building resilience. To achieve this, procedures for low damage seismic design have been developed to satisfy both the life safety requirement and the need to minimize the undesirable economic effects of required building repair or replacement following a severe earthquake. The performance of these buildings is dependent on whole building system interactions, which are difficult to determine by numerical modelling. The purpose of this project is to experimentally test the seismic performance of a complete, low damage, full scale building system incorporating a number of friction energy dissipaters in forms of sliding hinge joint asymmetric friction connection (SHJAFC), resilient slip friction joint (RSFJ), symmetric friction connection (SFC) and GripNGrab (GnG). This will also incorporate testing without and with non-structural elements (NSEs) to quantify their effect on the building response. Testing will be based on appropriately scaled actual earthquake records using two linked 70-ton shake tables at Tongji University, Shanghai, China. Unidirectional each axis and biaxial horizontal testing will be undertaken. The structure is expected to have at worst minor damage under a series of severe earthquakes. The design also aims to have economical methods for repairing and straightening such building systems after severe seismic activities, if there is a need. This paper focuses on the design of the structural part in this project, presenting the preliminary design of the structure.