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Florence is known all over the world for its history, monuments, Museums, and artworks. Unfortunately, such precious manufacts are not always adequately protected against natural hazards. Works of art, indeed, are very vulnerable to seismic effects, due to their irregular and slender shapes, and their fragile materials. All these reasons make them vulnerable to seismic events even when they do not achieve a destructive intensity. The current Technical Codes point out such vulnerability, despite providing guidelines not completely adequate to prevent the seismic damage. In this frame, a research activity has started within the Department of Architecture of Florence aimed at investigating the dynamic response of artworks to seismic events, including both simplified form-filling and more detailed Finite Element analyses. In this work, the seismic performance of the marble statue “Oceanus” by Giambologna has been as- sessed by adopting three different analytical models.

The Church of Sant’Agostino is an aulic example of medieval mendicant architecture. The church is part of central Italy’s huge heritage reduced to ruin by the earthquake of 2016 and 2017. Those repeated seismic shocks caused the collapse of the rose window, the bell tower, the adjacent urbic door and the northwest side. The following work concerns the cultural and technological issues of the reconstruction project for a ruin which was caused by traumatic events. These ruins have intrinsic cultural values. This essay proposes design solutions for the church of Sant'Agostino: without altering the focus of the intervention, which consists of preservation of the cultural values of what still persists, the project envisages the reconstruction and rubble recycling, using constructive techniques that are both traditional and contemporary. Furthermore, the border line between the ruin and the rebuilt parts is marked out with both modern technological and formal solutions.

The proposal for improving the constructive scheme of the supporting frame of the suspension building has been considered. The strains in its bearing elements due to earthquakes are significantly less than in the traditional cantilever buildings. In former schemes the vertical components of strains develop during horizontal oscillations of the grounds. This disadvantage has been eliminated now. It is shown that in the improved design of the structure under the earthquake the vertical component of vibrations is practically absent, due to arrangement of the suspension device strictly vertically. The numerical data for calculation results with variation of some characteristics of the supporting frame and suspensions have been shown in order to allow adjusting the dynamic strains at the vibrations of the base. The scheme for installation the vertical elements of the frame have been proposed. Its usage will allow to build the high-rise suspension buildings.