Arts and Culture

Prota has been working on survey, restitution, restoration, and rehabilitation of historic buildings belong to a wide range of historical periods: Hellenistic, Roman, Ottoman, and Republican periods.

Home to countless civilizations for centuries, Anatolia has presented us with a substantial basis to strengthen our historical field of expertise. For many years Prota has been one of the prominent engineering firms consulted by the Ministry of Culture regarding survey, restitution, restoration, and rehabilitation of historical buildings.

With its broad range of experience and knowledge in rehabilitation and strengthening of historical structures, Prota not only provides design services but also constitutes a “source of reference” for those who are interested in the field. Prota owes the privilege of resolving issues of importance regarding historical structures to its incessant abilities and efforts for research and development activities.

Prota engineers and architects have attended numerous symposiums and conferences and presented papers regarding conservation, certification, and seismic rehabilitation of historical assets. In addition to research studies conducted in collaboration with universities on methodology development for assessment and certification of historical assets, Prota has developed various three-dimensional structural analysis methods to strengthen these assets as earthquake resistant.

Within this context, structural analyses and seismic rehabilitation designs of many historical assets constructed by masonry, stone wall bearing, timber, cast iron, and adobe systems have been carried out. Among the historical and cultural assets that Prota has worked on so far are stadiums, theatre buildings, hammams, caravanserais, castles, mosques, mausoleums, churches, ateliers, city entrance structures.

Prota has undertaken many earthquake performance assessment projects concerning historical structures. One particular example is the unique approach developed, as a first in the industry, for the Istanbul Fatih District Historical Building Stock for the assessment of more than two hundred buildings; the comparison with the sophisticated analyses has verified the reliability of the simplified procedures developed by Prota. The procedure should be construed as first-tier analysis method for a rapid survey of historic buildings. Its accuracy is similar to that of methods developed for buildings. In many cases, the estimates for the gross shear stresses in the walls agreed well with the average stresses in those walls derived from the next tier of analyses.