Improved rapid assessment of earthquake hazard safety of existing buildings using a hierarchical Type 2 Fuzzy Logic Model Although it is impractical to avert subsequent natural disasters advances in simulation science and seismological studies make it possible to lessen the catastrophic damage. There currently exists in many urban areas a large number of structures which are prone to damage by earthquakes. These were constructed without the guidance of a national seismic code either before it existed or before it was enforced. For instance in Istanbul Turkey as a high seismic area around 90% of buildings are substandard which can be generalized into other earthquakeprone regions in Turkey. The reliability of this building stock resulting from earthquake induced collapse is currently uncertain. Nonetheless it is also not feasible to perform a detailed seismic vulnerability analysis on each building as a solution to the scenario as it will be too complicated and expensive. This indicates the necessity of a reliable rapid and computationally easy method for seismic vulnerability assessment commonly known as Rapid Visual Screening (RVS). In RVS methodology an observational survey of buildings is performed and according to the data collected during the visual inspection a structural score is calculated without performing any structural calculations to determine the expected damage of a building and whether the building needs detailed assessment. Although this method might save time and resources due to the subjective qualitative judgments of experts who performed the inspection the evaluation process is dominated by vagueness and uncertainties where the vagueness can be handled adequately through the fuzzy set theory but do not cover all sort of uncertainties due to its crisp membership functions. In this study a novel method of rapid visual hazard safety assessment of buildings against earthquake is introduced in which an interval type 2 fuzzy logic system (IT2FLS) is used to cover uncertainties. In addition the proposed method provides the possibility to evaluate the earthquake risk of the building by considering factors related to the building importance and exposure. A smartphone app prototype of the method has been introduced. For validation of the proposed method two case studies have been selected and the result of the analysis presents the robust efficiency of the proposed method.