Optimal design method of nonlinear damping system for seismic response control of adjacent structures is studied in this paper. The objective functions of the optimal design are defined by structural response and total amount of the dampers. In order to obtain a solution minimizing two mutually conflicting objective functions simultaneously, multi-objective optimization technique based on genetic algorithm is adopted. In addition, stochastic linearization method is embedded into the multi-objective framework to efficiently estimate the seismic responses of the adjacent structures interconnected by nonlinear hysteretic dampers without performing nonlinear time-history analyses. As a numerical example to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique, 20-story and 10-story buildings are considered and MR dampers of which hysteretic behaviors vary with the magnitude of the input voltage are considered as nonlinear hysteretic damper interconnecting two adjacent buildings. The proposed approach can provide the optimal number and capacities of the MR dampers, which turned out to be more economical than the uniform distribution system while maintaining similar control performance. The proposed damper system is verified to show more stable performance in terms of the pounding probability between two adjacent buildings. The applicability of the proposed method to the design problem for optimally placing semi-active control system is examined as well.