In medium and high rise building, reinforced concrete shear walls are a predominant lateral load resisting members in shear wall system and wall-frame lateral building systems under lateral loads. Constructions of medium to high rise buildings in seismic zone of Ethiopia are becoming significant in number. Thus proper detailing and construction of shear walls should be considered seriously in achieving a good seismic performance of such structures for seismic loads. Shear wall unlike column has a significant stress variation along the cross section. Away from the neutral axis the stress is getting increased and reaches maximum at the free edges. In addition, due to reversal nature of seismic actions, free edges of shear wall are subjected to high stress. So that this portions of shear wall need special treatment. Two kinds of shear wall design/ detail approaches are considered in the thesis, which are shear wall designed having boundary element at both free edges based on ES EN 2015 code and shear wall designed with uniformly spaced reinforcement throughout the wall in a multistory building as usual case of construction of shear walls in Ethiopia. In this thesis, the seismic performance of those shear wall types on 15 story buildings was investigated. To do this, first the whole building structural elements were designed according to ES EN 2015 code but the second type of shear wall which was detailed with uniform size and space of reinforcement to simulate the actual practice. Then a three dimensional pushover analysis was carried out using ETABS software incorporating definition of nonlinear materials. A smeared multi layer shell elements was used to model both types of shear wall. The parameters employed for comparisons were base shear force, top story displacement, internal forces in frames and formation of plastic hinges. The results show that shear wall having boundary element in a fifteen story building has significant difference in global displacement and strength for the overall structure of the buildings as compared to that of shear wall have no boundary element. Even if the buildings for both shear wall types have shown elastic state, frame elements in case-1 building have a better formation of hinges and lesser internal forces have been observed under pushover analysis. Detail results are discussed in the last chapter.