SUMMARYCoupled steel plate shear wall (C‐SPSW) consists of two or more steel plate shear walls interconnected by coupling beams at the floor levels. In this study, a six‐story C‐SPSW prototype building was designed. A 40% scale C‐SPSW specimen, which is representative of the bottom two‐and‐half‐story substructure of the prototype, was cyclically tested using Multi‐Axial Testing System at the National Center for Research on Earthquake Engineering in 2009. In addition to a constant vertical force representing the gravity load effects, cyclic increasing displacements and the corresponding overturning moments transmitted from the upper stories were computed online and simultaneously applied on the substructural specimen. This paper firstly introduces the designs of the prototype C‐SPSW and the test specimen. Then, the test results and the numerical simulation are discussed in detail. Test results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed column capacity design method, which aims at limiting the plastic hinge formation within the bottom quarter height of the bottom column. Test and analytical results suggest that the coupling beam rotational demands can be estimated as the design story drifts when the formation of desirable plastic mechanism of the C‐SPSW is expected. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.