The reduction of displacements and accelerations in buildings is a vital aspect in the design of structures under an earthquake excitation. Thus, the vibration control of structures in areas subject to seismic events has become an important research topic in engineering. Among the proposed mechanisms to reduce vibrations in structures, are the magneto rheological dampers (MR). Magneto rheological dampers are passive or semi-active devices for vibration control characterized by small energy consumption. These mechanisms are characterized by a nonlinear hysteretic behavior that usually leads to large energy dissipation. In this paper the effect of an MR damper and its characteristic parameters in reducing the vibrations of buildings and slender towers is studied. For this, the Bouc-Wen model is adopted. The building is described as a discrete mass-spring-damper-type shear-building and the tower as a multiple pendulum, which takes into account large displacements and rotations. It is considered that the damper is located in the structure (first floor) or as a base isolation system, in order to verify the influence of the location of the damper in the reduction of dynamic responses. When the device is used as a base isolation, both models show a large decrease of the dynamic response as compared to the results with the device on the first floor. The influence of the relationship between the frequencies of the structure and frequency content of the excitation on the efficiency of MR damper is also investigated. The results show that this relation has a great influence on the degree of reduction of vibrations of the controlled structure. In all cases here analyzed, it is observed that the MR damper leads to a reduction of the vibration response, in particular the displacement of the structure.