PORT-AU-PRINCE -- A new hospital in the Turgeau neighborhood dissolved into a pancaked stack of concrete floor slabs surrounded by broken toilets. The shell of a nearby high school rested atop its crumbled first floor.

But just across Avenue Jean Paul II, a gleaming aluminum-and-glass skyscraper escaped almost unscathed.

Digicel's headquarters, the tallest building in Haiti completed a little more than a year ago by the country's largest phone company, stands out even more than it did before a powerful 7.0 earthquake left much of this city in ruins. A First World tower in a Third World city, it was designed using American building codes to endure 7.2 shock waves or higher. It did.

``You don't call the structural engineer in at the end of your drawing. You start with the structural engineer before it's built,' said architect Christian Dutour, pleased after surveying his 12-story building. ``Otherwise, it doesn't work.''

In a way, that also explains why so many other structures in its shadow collapsed.

Most buildings in Haiti go up without engineers, standards or inspections. The earthquake is only the latest, and worst, tragedy to expose the largely unregulated and slapdash construction long accepted on the island -- practices that structural engineers believe added to a staggering death toll that could reach 200,000.

While extensive death and destruction would be expected from a 7.0 temblor so close to a densely populated and dirt-poor city, earthquake experts have nonetheless been shocked by the catastrophic failure of so many prominent and critical buildings.

It wasn't just humble shacks and turn-of-the-previous-century icons like the historic Roman Catholic Cathedral of Port-au-Prince, but new and newly renovated schools, police stations, bank branches, high-end hotels and hospitals. The U.S. Agency for International Development reported Thursday that 13 of 15 government ministry buildings had been destroyed.

``This was pseudo-engineering. It was terrible,'' said Eduardo Fierro, a California-based forensic and seismic engineer who was among the first experts to survey the damage.

``For the poor people who do their own building, you shouldn't expect better,'' said Fierro, who spoke from Santo Domingo after nearly a week in Haiti. ``For the people who have a four-story building, for the Hotel Montana, a fancy hotel where all the foreign visitors stay, you should expect better. There is complete ignorance of seismic behavior.''

Only last month, the Organization of American States completed a study concluding that a far less serious natural disaster would destroy many of Haiti's buildings. It detailed a litany of flaws: weak or missing reinforcement, structures on steep slopes with unstable foundations, inadequate or nonexistant inspections, poor designs, materials and techniques.

The findings, which the agency has not yet released, would surprise no one in Haiti. They're common across much of the Caribbean and in developing communities.

``The people tend to do whatever they want to do. If I want to build my house, I can just go and do it,'' said Pierre Fouche, a Haitian working on a doctorate in earthquake engineering at the University of Buffalo, with the goal of finding affordable methods to strengthen his country's lax standards and structures.

But woeful building seems a particular plague for Haiti. Last year, for instance, a church-run school in Pétionville suddenly collapsed -- with no push from nature -- killing 91 students and teachers and injuring 162 others.