Design
The 'Most Hopeful' New Housing in Turkey
Twenty years after being displaced by an earthquake, families in Düzce, Turkey, are getting homes that they helped design and build themselves.
ISTANBUL—Serdar Yolay was 13 years old when a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck his hometown in northwestern Turkey, killing more than 700 people and destroying thousands of homes, including his family’s.
“Thank God, we weren’t home then; we’d gone to my aunt’s house for a meal,” Yolay recalled. “When we came back into town, we couldn’t find our bearings—all of the buildings in the city center were laying in the streets. You could step on top of the five-story building we’d lived in. It was completely flattened.”