Even though the arching action in a continuous transfer plate–shear wall system is different from that of a single-span one, the concept of the effective interaction zone is considered the same. Figure 14 shows the distribution of the vertical stress sz in walls. It can be seen that at a height equal to the span of the transfer plate L from the wall–plate interface, i.e. z /L = 1, the value of sz remains ap- proximately the same, indicating that the interaction of the plate and wall has little effect on the distribution of the vertical stress, which tends to be uniform beyond the interactive zone.