Why one upscale apartment building became a death trap

RENAISSANCE Residence was a testament to Turkey’s grand ambitions, a large, iconic project designed to meet the rising expectations of an expanding middle class in a rapidly developing part of the country.

Towering over what was once farmland for wheat, okra and cotton, the upscale complex offered hotel-style amenities and helped transform the rural enclave of Ekinci into a bustling suburb, attracting judges, teachers, doctors, police officers and professional soccer players.

Despite significant earthquake risk, Selma Keskin, a lawyer and single mother who moved into a third-floor apartment with her adolescent son, was reassured by the pedigree of the building, a signature work of a prominent local firm headed by a well-known architect. “We never thought he would build a building that was not earthquake-proof,” Keskin said.

It was destined to fail.

Across southern Turkey, the 7.8-magnitude earthquake before dawn on Feb 6 and a second major tremor hours later killed more than 50,000 people and devastated hundreds of thousands of buildings. Like many structures that collapsed, Renaissance was completed in the past decade, when updated seismic codes were supposed to ensure a building’s strength.

But a monthslong investigation and forensic analysis by The New York Times found that the death toll at Renaissance, the site of one of the deadliest building collapses in the quake, was the tragic result of flawed design and minimal oversight.

A series of poor architectural decisions and risky design choices left the building unfit to handle the stress of the seismic forces. An engineer who reviewed the structural plans and detailed them to the Times said the building violated the basic tenets of engineering, leaving the ground floor particularly vulnerable.

The system of safety checks was deficient, characterised by a lack of regulatory enforcement and professional rigour. All along, local officials, private inspectors and building engineers missed the problems. The municipal adviser who issued the construction permit said he did not have the right software to check the developer’s calculations. An inspector who signed more than 100 reports on Renaissance said he had never heard of the building until after the collapse.

“I cannot explain what was the intention here with this design,” said Osman Ozbulut, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Virginia who researches earthquake-resilient design. “It’s the most puzzling building.”

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The Renaissance contractors insist that they followed all the codes in place at the time but that the regulations were insufficient to withstand such a powerful earthquake.

The Times’ findings were based on an extensive review of government documents, court records, structural plans, architectural drawings and images of the building, as well as site visits and interviews with scores of engineers, seismologists, local officials, survivors and professionals associated with the project. Using that information, the Times constructed a 3D model of Renaissance that revealed multiple weaknesses and several points of failure that could have brought the building down.

The main building in the Renaissance complex toppled over, evidence that the building had major vulnerabilities on the lower level and the south side.

When the earthquake hit, the three separate apartment towers that made up the main building fell in nearly identical ways, suggesting that they were built with the same flaws.

Just a few inches apart, the 13-storey towers – A1, A2 and A3 – were superficially joined, with the gaps between them sealed so they appeared as one building.

The most vulnerable part of Renaissance was the ground floor, which had an open layout. To make room for recreational spaces, this level had fewer masonry blocks than elsewhere, as well as taller columns that were more susceptible to lateral motion in quakes. That most likely created a vulnerability called a soft storey.

The soft-storey flaw made the lower level more prone to swaying. The horizontal forces could have weakened the ground-floor columns and possibly torn them apart. Images of the wreckage made clear that all three towers broke off around the ground floor.

The building may have also been vulnerable to a phenomenon known as overturning. In that situation, the movement of the upper floors creates a downward force on the ground-floor columns, threatening their ability to remain intact. Both the soft storey and overturning probably played roles in destroying the ground-floor columns, but experts varied in how much importance they assigned to each.

Keskin was alone and awake in her third-floor living room when the earthquake hit. Rescuers found her four storeys below in the bottom of the parking garage, trapped in the rubble on the south side of one of the towers.

Keskin’s car, parked on the north side of the garage, survived without a scratch. The difference in damage between the two sides was the result of Renaissance toppling southward.

The building fell southward in part because the framework of beams and columns was misaligned and the structural connections were insufficient between the two sides. The strongest concrete walls, or cores, were also clustered on the north side. Cores are essential for a building’s resistance to seismic forces. Those flaws meant the south side did not benefit from the same seismic protections as the north side.

Renaissance was a product of a building boom throughout Turkey, a pillar of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s plans for development and economic growth.

Renaissance sailed through a system of weak checks, the Times found. Unqualified local officials granted its permissions, building inspectors filed shoddy paperwork and ambition overtook caution as the towers rose.

“Everyone was happy because it was a beautiful building, with a garden and a pool,” Seyfettin Yeral, the local mayor when Renaissance was built, said in an interview. Asked if his council had considered earthquake risk when approving the project, he said: “Sadly, no.”

In a statement, the contractors disputed many of the Times’ findings, saying that they had followed all the necessary procedures; that the building’s bearing system was consistent and solid; and that the design of the ground floor did not make it a “soft storey.”

Most buildings around Renaissance remained standing, noted Baris Erkus, a structural engineer based in Istanbul who visited the site and dozens of others after the quake. If a building has been properly designed, “it would experience some large damage”, Erkus said, “but the structure would not fail in this manner”.

When Renaissance opened in the summer of 2013, the complex, which included the area’s largest residential building, cultivated a sense of exclusivity, the name emblazoned in orange and silver at the entrance. The lobby was designed to mimic a hotel’s, with a cafe where residents could socialise. The complex eventually featured a day care centre, a Pilates studio, a swimming pool, a hairdresser and ping-pong tables.

“It looked very attractive,” said Mustafa Sahin, a dentist who often visited his parents there. “I would have liked to live in such a place, to raise a child there.”

The sense of safety was enhanced by the prestige of the builders. Two well-known brothers ran the company that built it, Antis Yapi. Yasar Coskun, the architect, was the head of the province’s Chamber of Architects, a professional association. His brother, Yalcin, was one of the engineers who planned the structure and oversaw much of the construction. Both were graduates of prestigious technical universities.

Coskun family members and their friends owned many apartments in Renaissance, as did the mayor’s wife and the wife of the building’s main inspector, seeming to vouch for its quality.

The land was owned by the Sahin family, whose patriarch, Suleyman, a local businessman and politician, bought it as an investment. As housing demand in Ekinci grew, Sahin applied in 2006 to have the property zoned for construction.

That decision fell to the local council, nine members and the mayor, who were elected by residents. Some of them belonged to big families that similarly owned land to develop, according to Yeral, the former mayor. Serving on the council required no technical expertise, and only a few members had finished middle school. Most had only an elementary education.

Ali Gunsay, a former member who was on the council that approved the rezoning for the Renaissance plot, described a perfunctory process to approve zoning changes. “They would bring these in front of us, tell us to sign them and we would sign,” he said. “We didn’t research much.”

The municipality’s technical affairs director, Mehmet Ezer, who advised the council, said he recommended against the rezoning, saying it was too generous for the area. Ekinci was small, with only about 6,700 residents in 2010.

Unlike the council members, Ezer was an engineering graduate of a prestigious university, but he said he had no power to challenge the council’s decisions. “These political bodies didn’t respect or take into account the opinions of technical personnel,” he said. “This was broken.”

Former council members said they did not recall Ezer voicing any opposition to Renaissance.

Ezer called it “logic-defying.”

Sahin, the landowner, said he had followed the required process. “We didn’t bribe anyone, didn’t give anyone anything,” he said. Construction was booming across Turkey at the time, so it was normal to get such zoning, he said.

Sahin hired the Coskun brothers to develop the site. He said Yasar Coskun, the architect, assured him that Renaissance would be strong enough to withstand even a nine-magnitude earthquake. “I told him I would give him a very good deal,” Sahin said. “Just build it safely.”

Before construction began, the plan became even more grandiose. A contract from December 2009 between the Sahin family and the Coskuns reviewed by the Times shows three separate towers, a layout that reduces the possibility that one building will damage another during an earthquake. But an updated contract from September 2010 contained a new plan: three towers joined together into one long, skinny building, with a fourth, shorter building to the south. The early plan had only 156 units. The new one had 251, probably making the project more lucrative.

The contractors said in their statement that the change had been done to create more, smaller apartments that would be easier to sell, not to make more money.

When the company needed a construction permit, it fell to Ezer, the technical affairs director, to issue it.

At the time, he said, he was overloaded with work and did not have the software the developer had used to design the building and so could not check the calculations. But he issued the permit anyway, and construction began.

On a cloudless day in May 2011, the Coskun brothers and a group of dignitaries in suits and hard hats pushed a button to pour the concrete for Renaissance’s foundation.

At the time, construction companies could hire the inspector of their choice, a practice that created conflicts of interest. Some builders even set up their own inspection companies so they could effectively inspect themselves. In 2019, the government changed the system, saying it had led to “illegal commercial ties” between builders and inspectors.

The Coskuns hired Yetkin Yapi Denetim. A Times review of more than 120 inspection reports raised questions about how rigorously the company had monitored construction on Renaissance.

Ilkay Teltik, a member of the Istanbul Chamber of Construction Engineers who reviewed the documents, described them as “perfunctory and sloppy”, with missing dates and other key details, such as the exact locations that concrete samples were taken from.

“The municipality should have checked these and not accepted them,” she said.

More than 100 of the reports were signed by one partner, Mehmet Hasim Eraslan, and government records listed him among the building’s inspectors.

When initially reached by phone, Eraslan said he had not heard of Renaissance before he saw it on the news after the collapse. “We were not its inspectors,” he said. He did not respond to later requests for more information.

Reyhan Dinler, a housewife, and her sister had been visiting Dinler’s daughter and grandson when the quake hit. She recalled furniture sliding around and a crack stretching across the room before she fainted. She woke up, stuck in the rubble, and heard voices, so she screamed and two men pulled her out. They took her to a petrol station where other survivors were gathering, many wearing just pajamas in the rain and near-freezing temperature.

In the months since the earthquake, Turkish prosecutors have been investigating Renaissance over the collapse and deaths. Two people have been arrested.

Yasar Coskun, the architect, was handcuffed at the airport while trying to fly to Montenegro. A son of a partner at the inspection company was also detained in the investigation, although there are no indications he worked at Renaissance. No one else from the inspection company has been arrested.

Prosecutors have issued warrants for at least two other people: a woman who surveyed the land and Yalcin Coskun, the contractor, who does business in Montenegro. Turkish authorities are seeking his extradition.

A rescue team from Hungary pulled Keskin out more than 50 hours after the quake. She apologised for how she looked and smelled, and thanked each of her rescuers before going to a hospital. Now, she feels like a new person, but she battles survivor’s guilt and rage at the men who built Renaissance.

“If what’s been said is true, it is really an engineering mistake,” she said. “I don’t have the heart to say it, but it is murder.”

As she has driven through the earthquake zone in recent weeks, she has taken notice of the many buildings that did not collapse.

“That means that if you do it right,” she said, “no one will die.” NYTIMES