Search

In the Twentieth Century, the industrial buildings featured a broad experimentation on the load-bearing structures suited to the production spaces. Among the structural elements explicitly designed for factories were reinforced concrete thin shells. In Italy, where reinforced concrete was the predominant construction technique for the entire century, the evolution of the thin shells for industrial buildings traced a significant story: starting from the introduction of foreign systems and patents in the 1920s, the design and construction of the thin shells gradually stacked to national productive and technological specificities. This paper presents a historical investigation of the application of thin shells in Italy between 1930 and 1970, remarking, thus, the local contribution of Italian contractors and designers in the evolution of both the design solutions and production process. Furthermore, the study presents a systematic historical and technical framework related to thin shells to support the actions of knowledge and safeguard the industrial building heritage.

The protection, management, and valorization processes of the Built World Heritage, of which the historic center of Rome is an integral part, include the study and use of the historical documents preserved in the archives of the territory. The Corp of Civil Engineering of Rome (Genio Civile di Roma) Found, kept in the State Archives in Rome, is a crucial source for the knowledge of the built heritage of Rome. The Fund holds significant data about the urban development of the city and the intervention to preserve the historic built heritage, from the last three decades of the 19th century – when Rome began as the capital of the unified state of Italy – to the mid of the 20th century. For the valorization of the Found a research agreement between the State Archives of Rome and the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” is established: in this framework, the cataloging and the study of this unique documentary heritage are correlated with integrated digital tools.

During the SIXXI research (“XX Century Structural Engineering: the Italian Contribution”, ERC Adv Grant, PI: Sergio Poretti, Tullia Iori) special study tools supported historical surveys on works. The experimentation on tools became an autonomous research topic, developing itself from the “reconstructive re-drawing”, pioneered by Poretti in the mid 1980s, up to 3D modelling and 3D printing. This paper resumes briefly its starting and illustrates most recent outcomes, as a board field of research in Construction and Structural engineering History.

Structural health monitoring is a crucial issue in areas with different hazard sources, such as Italy. Among non-invasive monitoring techniques, remote sensing provides useful information in supporting the management process and safety evaluations, reducing the impact of disturbances on the functionality of construction systems. The ground displacement time-series based on the analysis of Differential Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (DInSAR) measurements, as well as the information about the geology of the area and the geometry of the construction under monitoring, provides useful data for the built environment’s structural assessment. This paper focuses on the structural monitoring and damage assessment of constructions based on the GIS integration of DInSAR measurements, geological investigation, historical surveys and 3D modeling. The methodology is applied to the residential area of Valco San Paolo in the city of Rome (Italy). Once the geological interpretation has confirmed the results of the DInSAR measurements, a quick damage assessment that considers all the possible conditions of the pre-existing damage at the time zero of the monitoring is shown for a damaged manufact in the area. The presented results highlight how the strategy to correlate the DInSAR-monitored ground settlements with the damage scales allows potentially to monitor continuous construction systems.

During the 1950s, the large ‘made in Italy’ reinforced concrete structure established itself around the world. As a consequence, fascinating Italian architects turned structural- and construction-based research into novel figurative conceptions. Enrico Castiglioni (1914–2000) was a distinctive interpreter of this collective phenomenon, but, although his work was significantly discussed in the literature of the 1950s and 1960s, it is today completely neglected. This paper presents construction-history surveys, providing a historical and technical narrative of Castiglioni’s built work.

In the aftermath of WW2, Europe – as the main war scene – endorsed the “fast time” approach to reconstruction. Relying on optimising production-and-building processes, this approach was widely resorted to in experimental quarters, regarded as the “starting point” on which to build the technical know-how leading to the industrialisation of building techniques. This paper analyses the French and Italian experiences. They are closely linked, since in the shared choice of reinforced concrete as the most eligible material, the French experimentation provided a pattern for Italian reconstruction; so, they jointly become trailblazing researches about making building science-based and about organising building-yard work.

During the SIXXI research (20th Century Structural Engineering: the Italian Contribution), new historical archives were exploited: WWII and its aftermath apperead, evitently, as importants periods for the history of structural engineering. The war for Liberation of Italy (1943-1945) was a unique occasion to test and stress structural design applied to “emergency” scope. An impressive cross-fertilization between the American methods and “know-how” of the Italian technicians featured the “fisrt aid” operations of the Alleys [This papers is framed in the SIXXI project (www.sixxi.eu), thanks to a ERC Adv Grant funding (PI S Poretti, T Iori)].

This research (a synthesis of the studies conducted within the project “Industrial Construction in Italy 1960-1980”, coordinated by Sergio Poretti) provides a historical overview on industrialized and prefabricated construction in Italy in the second half of the 20th century. In terms of historiography, the study discloses the special characters of Italian experience compared with the industrialization process, accomplished in Europe. In terms of operational perspective, the research provides an useful tool to face the topic of conservation and rehabilitation of a wide architectural heritage to date still in use. Based on archival survey, the study sheds the lights on a neglected story. The research track a line between the post war debate, the traditionalist turn of the INA Casa plan, to the main actions of the public planning for housing and schools. However them were false starts. The process, reduced to anachronistic use of foreign building techniques, will last only few years, dilated over time by constant discussion about the results. Once were given up expectations of an overall reconversion of the building sector, prototypes, remain, presently, witnesses of the foresight that Italian experience demonstrated on the small scale industrial production.

The historical reconstruction shows how the industrialization of the schools building sector, was developed in Italy far from the corresponding European experiences. In fact, although the school building sector represented in Italy the most actual tender to stage a general process of industrialization of the construction process (for temporal extension and scale of production), the fragmentation of the planning horizon forces the outcomes on a small-scale production. The industrialization of building systems was, thus, deeply related to the single realization (or a small group of buildings). Today, this fact underlines the need to deal “case by case” (through the knowledge of facts and buildings) the actions due to preserve the buildings heritage.