TC301 Historic Sites

By considering that each monuments is a "unicum" and taking into account the concept of "integrity" it is rather difficult to apply approaches based on guidelines to the preservation of monuments. Therefore the effort is devoted to

• framing of the special requirements and constraints to be considered in any rehabilitation intervention on Monuments in order to preserve their of cultural and historical integrity;
• geotechnical methodologies suitable for the interventions on Monuments and Historic sites.

The Second Kerisel Special Lecture was successfully devivered by prof. Carlo Viggiani at the 2017 Seoul ICSMGE.

A three-day International Symposium on Geotechnical Aspects of Heritage Structures (ISGHS 2019) will be organised by National Centre for Safety of Heritage Structure of IIT Madras (NCSHS-IITM) & IGS-Chennai Chapter in collaboration with IGS-Trichy Chapter and Anna University under the aegis of Technical Committee (TC301) of International Society of Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering (ISSMGE). 

The venue is decided as IIT  Madras,  Chennai  which is strategically located in southern part of India with numerous heritage structures (including UNESCO World Heritage site of Mahabalipuram)  within its vicinity. 

Dates are fixed as 16 - 18  September 2019.  The 1st bulletin of the symposium has been already circulated.

Summary on recent activities (2019) of our TC members.

1. Jean-David VERNHES was our delegate at the ECSMGE in Reykjavik and He reports as follows:

(a) regarding Tuesday’s TC301 session, thoroughly chaired by Cavit Atalar, Nicosia, all presented topics were consistently related to Heritage. The session received the interest of the audience (the room was packed with people, what wasn’t always the case in other sessions). All our session contributions are online on the ECSMGE 2019 website:

(see D3 - 6 in : https://www.ecsmge-2019.com/papers---oral-sessions.html)

(b)  During Monday lunch, the TC members Charles Augarde, Guido Gottardi, Daniele Spizzichino and Jean-David Vernhes reflected on many aspects of our activity, two of them deserving special attention:

b1. Expanding the reference terms, in order to capture not only the role of our discipline on the safegarding and preservation of a single monument, but also considering the preservation of "diffuse heritage", i.e. problems related to the scale of a urban environment (slope stability, exacavations, undergroung infrastructures etc.)

b2. Interaction with other disciplines and professionals involved in decision making when dealing with intevention techniques.

2. Two members of our TC were invited to deliver keynote lectures at the International Symposium on Geotechnical aspects of Heritage Structure (ISGHS 2019), organized by IGS-Chennai Chapter & National Centre for Safety of Heritage Structure (NCSHS-IITM), Madras, 16-18 September 2019: Alessandro FLORA and  Yoshinori Iwasaki.

The lecture delivered by Flora was titled “The key role of geotechnical engineering in the preservation of monuments”, and presented the case history of the Theodosian walls and towers of Costantinopoli (nowadays Istanbul, Turkey) to show that by jointly considering local response analysis and dynamic soil – structure interaction, the seismic behavior of historic structures can be reliably predicted, and such an approach should be always used to guide restoration works in order to minimize the effects of earthquakes.

The lecture delivered by Iwasaki was titled “The authenticity and integrity of soils and foundations of heritage structures” and concentrated on the need to clearly define these concepts before planning retrofitting works. Some well known case histories, like the Pisa tower, were shown in his lecture as examples of effective actions on heritage structures.

Both lectures raised interest in the attendees and were followed by intense discussion.

Many case histories of Hindu and Muslim monuments were presented by other speakers in the conference, showing a lively local geotechnical community working on cultural heritage.

Finally, the dissemination project of a Book Series on "Built Heritage and Geotecnics", published by Taylor&Francis is successfully in progress. The first two volumes on the Ghirlandina Tower in Modena and the Cathedral of Mexico City, that are examples of interaction among different disciplines and professionals, are already available. The reference website:

https://www.crcpress.com/Built-Heritage-and-Geotechnics/book-series/BHG

No special links have been yet established, by considering the peculiarity of this topic.