Thinking stone: some aspects of the structural design evolution for the Padre Pio church, Italy
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[1] Arup-Italia
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- Localización: The Structural Engineer: journal of the Institution of Structural Engineer, ISSN 1466-5123, Vol. 100, Nº. 1, 2022, págs. 40-42
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
The August 2020 issue of The Structural Engineer featured a paper by Alistair Lenczner which describes the design and construction of the stone-arched church for Padre Pio, in southern Italy1 . Design started in 1990, when the Italian architect Renzo Piano (RPBW) appointed Arup as structural consultant. The Arup director Peter Rice, who sadly died in 1992, initiated development of its ‘preliminary’ design stage, which was completed by 1994.
What follows highlights some aspects of the project’s design and describes the reasons for some important structural changes made to the previous scheme.
In 1995, I was asked to lead the project’s detailed design and deliver it to the Italian tender stage. At that time, I had already worked in the Arup London offi ce for 22 years and was familiar with Arup’s philosophy of ‘integrated multidisciplinary design’ and ‘total architecture’.
During those years, I had been responsible for the design and construction of many large projects in the Middle East and Europe, and my previous engagement with this gifted architect dated to the late 1970s, when Rice ‘posted’ me for several months to Piano’s offi ce in Genoa to be ‘the architect’s resident engineer’.
When I took on this project, I analysed the ‘preliminary’ output with a small team of young engineers. Our task was presumed to be a routine design completion of what had already been crystalised in Rice’s scheme. This view soon proved to be too optimistic, mainly because of the serious seismic hazard posed by any masonry building in the area, as well as the absence of a national code for that material. I arranged several meetings with the architect to discuss the way forward and the structural changes that, in my opinion, would be necessary. Piano agreed to the proposals outlined below.
The scene was now set for the start of a wonderful creative vision: the design of an important loadbearing masonry structure, unreinforced, located in a highly seismic area, and without the bondage of the ‘middle third’, which for centuries had conditioned civil engineering construction. This vision was enthusiastically shared with the numerous Arup colleagues who accompanied me on this journey.
The ‘new design’ needed a longer delivery timeframe than had been expected and a larger team. Thus, at this point, we benefi ted with the contribution of Alistair Lenczner, among others, who had worked on the 1990–94 scheme under Rice. He joined the group of young engineers whose task was the form-fi nding of the new arches.
What followed was a delicate renegotiation of a complex and challenging contract as, on the same project, we were subconsultant to the architect and simultaneously employed by the main client, or its contractors, for various specifi c tasks. Many of these were impractical to delegate and therefore fell into my lap.
These included the writing of specifi cations and the supervision of a ‘tailored’ geotechnical and seismic site investigation which was crucial for the defi nition of a seismic spectrum appropriate for that site. I also had to write many of the technical reports in Italian;
organise meetings with local and national authorities; plan a programme with feasible targets and delivery dates; chair internal and external design meetings; and write the laboratory test specifi cation which had been planned for the stone arches’ connections.
