As civil engineering technology development, the structural form selection is more and more critical in design of high-rise buildings. However, structural form selection involves expertise knowl-edge and changes with the environment which makes the task arduous. An approach utilizing im-proved back propagation ( BP) neural network optimized by the Levenberg-Marquardt ( L-M) algo-rithm is proposed to extract the main controlling factors of structural form selection. Then, an intelli-gent expert system with artificial neural network is constructed to design high-rise buildings structure effectively. The experiment tests the model in 15 well-known architecture samples and get the predic-tion accuracy of 93 . 33％. The results show that the method is feasible and can help designers select the appropriate structural form.