Megacities Today, Rubble Tomorrow: Haiti as Architectural Wake-Up Call

A major disaster--and a few success stories--show architecture is the problem and the solution for earthquake-prone cities.

This week in The New York Times, Andrew Revkin published a wake-up call for megacities: Learn from Haiti; you might be next. And the problem is architecture. Earthquakes don't kill people, he says. Buildings do. "In recent earthquakes, buildings have acted as weapons of mass destruction," Roger Bilham, a seismologist who Revkin interviews, wrote in Nature. Most of the...