Traditional control strategies have difficulty handling nonlinear behavior of structures, time variable features and parameter uncertainties of structural control systems under seismic excitation. An off-and-towards-equilibrium (OTE) strategy combined with fuzzy control is presented in this paper to overcome these difficulties. According to the OTE strategy, the control force is designed from the viewpoint of a mechanical relationship between the motions of the structure, the exciting force and the control force. The advantage of the OTE strategy is that it can be used for a variety of control systems. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed strategy, the seismic performance of a three-story shear building with an Active Tendon System (ATS) using a Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC) is studied. The main advantage of the fuzzy controller is its inherent robustness and ability to handle any nonlinear behavior of structures. However, there are no design guidelines to set up the corresponding control rule table for a FLC. Based on the proposed strategy for the FLC, a control rule table associated with the building under study is developed, which then allows formation of a detailed algorithm. The results obtained in this study show that the proposed strategy performs slightly better than the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) strategy, while possessing several advantages over the LQR controller. Consequently, the feasibility and validity of the proposed strategy are verified.