Restoration / Architecture · Design and Construction
Guide
If you own a registered building, the questions that come up tend to be the same: where does one begin, which documents are needed, what does the board ask for, what does each term actually mean. If you are planning a new building or a renovation, you will also find the questions asked most often — from architectural fees to zoning status, from the permit process to cost estimates. These guides answer exactly those questions.
My historic building collapsed — what now?
If your registered building has collapsed, the process is not over. But what you do first matters as much as what you avoid doing: the right step taken before the debris is touched prevents losses of evidence that cannot be made good later.
Survey, restitution, restoration, reconstruction: what is the difference?
These four terms are often confused, yet the distinction between them is clear — and it directly determines which work you need. In short: a measured survey documents the present, restitution reconstructs the past on paper, restoration repairs what is standing, and reconstruction rebuilds what has been lost.
How does the Conservation Board process work?
No intervention may be made on a registered building without board approval. This guide describes the process from the owner’s point of view: what goes into the file, how the board decides, how long it takes and what tends to slow it down.
The Antakya courtyard house: a glossary of elements
The Antakya house is not assembled at random; it grows out of a recurring grammar. Courtyard, liwan, bird niche, bağdadi lath-and-plaster, alaturka tile… Each element in this glossary is explained through real examples we documented in our own projects, with the drawings we delivered.
The Antakya urban conservation area: what remains after the earthquake?
The earthquakes of 6 February 2023 struck Antakya’s registered building stock hard. An academic field study examined 250 registered buildings in the urban conservation area one by one and recorded their condition. This guide sets out what that data says and what can be done next.
Why do historic buildings decay?
Before repairing a historic building there is one question that has to be answered: what caused this damage? Repair carried out without removing the cause wastes both the money and the effort spent on it. This guide sets out how the conservation literature classifies the causes of decay, and how they appear in Antakya.
Why is a building registered? The criteria for conservation
There is no arbitrary answer to the question “why is my house registered?”. The decision rests on three criteria — documentary value, age and aesthetic value — and the group a building falls into determines directly what you may do to it.
A glossary of restoration techniques
What the terms you meet in a restoration report or a board decision actually mean. From consolidation to anastylosis, from jacketing to patina — each term explained plainly, together with the situation it belongs to.
Where does the idea of restoration come from?
Repair is as old as building itself; but restoration became a discipline bound by principles only in the nineteenth century. To understand why “let us return it to its original state” is not always the right answer, it helps to know that two-hundred-year argument.
How is a historic building at risk assessed?
The “risk assessment” made before an earthquake and the “damage assessment” made after one are not the same thing. Their methods differ, and so do their legal consequences. Here is which is needed when in a registered building, and where the regulations leave a gap.
What function should a restored house be given?
What becomes of an Antakya house once it has been repaired? A dwelling, a café, a cultural venue? The decision on function is not a technical detail of the restoration but the decision that settles the building’s future. An unused house is lost; a wrongly used house is lost in another way.
What is a conservation development plan, and how does it govern your plot?
What can be done in the historic centre of Antakya is settled not plot by plot but by the conservation development plan. For a plot inside the urban conservation area, everything from the number of storeys to the character of the facade, from a demolition decision to the right to rebuild, is discussed within the frame that plan draws.
Architectural Fees and Construction Cost: What to Know
How is an architectural fee set, what does building a house or villa actually cost, how much floor area does your plot allow, and how does the permit process work? A comprehensive roadmap grounded in current planning regulation, answering the questions asked most often.
Let’s discuss your project
We prepare measured survey, restitution, restoration and reconstruction projects across Türkiye — above all in Hatay and Antakya — and manage Regional Conservation Board procedures from a single hand.