The structural system reliability evaluation is still a difficult problem.In the present paper,a typical case is studied to illustrate that an equivalent extreme value event could be constructed so that the correlation information is inherent in the probabilistic integration of the equivalent extreme value. This concept could then be extended to deal with the reliability evaluation of general structures with complex failure criterion through constructing an equivalent extreme value event to evaluate the reliability through a simple integration of the extreme value distribution.Numerical examples on static and dynamic reliability evaluation demonstrate that the proposed method is versatile and of acceptable accuracy.