1. The study examines the effect of shear walls on the seismic performance of reinforced concrete open ground storey frame buildings. 2. Linear static and nonlinear static analyses are used to compare the performance of open ground storey buildings with and without shear walls. Various multiplication factors are applied to model strengthened configurations. 3. The results show that shear walls improve the capacity of open ground storey buildings to resist seismic forces but strengthening comes at a higher comparative cost.