As part of the development of a European Seismic Risk Model 2020 (ESRM20), the spatial and temporal evolution of seismic design across Europe has been studied in order to better classify reinforced concrete buildings (which represent more than 30% of the approximately 145 million residential, commercial and industrial buildings in Europe) and map them to vulnerability models based on simulated seismic design. This paper summarises the model that has been developed to assign the years when different seismic design levels (low code, moderate code and high code) were introduced in a number of European countries and the associated lateral forces that were specified spatially within each country for the low and moderate codes for typical reinforced concrete mid-rise buildings. This process has led to an improved understanding of how design regulations evolved across Europe and how this has impacted the vulnerability of the European residential building stock. The model estimates that ~60% of the reinforced concrete buildings in Europe have been seismically designed, and of those buildings ~60% have been designed to low code, ~25% to moderate code and 15% to high code. This seismic design model aims at being a dynamic source of information that will be continuously updated with additional feedback from local experts and datasets. To this end, all of the data has been made openly available as shapefiles on a GitLab repository.

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Despite the extensive use of modern construction materials, old masonry buildings, characterized by high consumption of energy and a high risk of partial or complete destruction during earthquakes, still represent a great majority of both residential and public building stock in many earthquake-prone countries, such as the countries in the Balkan region. Improvement of seismic resistance and energy efficiency of these buildings is very important and actual topic worldwide. The delicate problem of proving the effectiveness of the selected consolidation, retrofitting or strengthening system can be successfully overcome by using the methodology of design assisted by testing, which as methodology, has been codified in all Eurocodes.

Within the frame of the EU FP6 PROHITECH project a methodology for seismic retrofitting of monuments using CFRP elements has been developed and experimentally verified by shaking table tests on a model of the Mustafa Pasha Mosque in Skopje. The resulted efficiency of the applied methodology was crucial and starting point in making the decision about the concept of seismic upgrading of the real monument. Namely, the retrofitting methodology using CFRP was applied for the first time on the structure of Mustafa Pasha Mosque in Skopje in the period 2007-2010. The authors of this paper had the opportunity and the challenge to design and supervised the application of the seismic retrofitting methodology, followed by all the necessary solutions for in-situ technical detailing. Following this successful story, the same or slightly modified retrofitting methodology has been implemented in several other mosques on the territory of North Macedonia and Kosovo. The paper presents the main points of the specific process of pre-investigation, analysis, design of retrofitting and its application in the abovementioned case studies.