The magnitude 7.4 earthquake on the Marmara segment of the North Anatolian Fault on 17 August 1999 killed more than 17,000 people by official figures. What set the scale of the destruction was less the severity of ground motion than the quality of the building stock: unsupervised concrete apartment blocks produced through rapid urbanisation from the 1970s, with soft storeys, short columns and low-strength materials. The engineering knowledge existed; what was missing was the institution that would enforce it.

The institutional answer came with the Building Inspection Law of 2001, requiring that a licensed inspection body independent of the contractor supervise a building's design and construction. On the code side, the texts of 1998 and 2007 were followed by the Turkish Building Earthquake Code that took effect in 2018, introducing performance-based design, a new hazard map (acceleration values computed for each coordinate rather than fixed zones) and mandatory seismic isolation for critical buildings such as hospitals. Programmes to strengthen schools and hospitals ran in Istanbul over the same period.

The two large earthquakes centred on Kahramanmaraş on 6 February 2023, with more than 50,000 lives lost, showed the limits of that framework. Most of the buildings that collapsed came from the pre-2000 stock; but gaps in inspection, the effect of construction amnesties and inadequate ground surveys were also identified in newer buildings. The central question in architecture and engineering in Turkey today is not how new buildings should be designed but what is to be done with an existing stock of millions of dwellings — a financial and legal problem as much as a technical one.