Robert Maillart's design approaches to 'Strong Structures': the engineering of architectural designs (9k attendance)

Zastavni, Denis [UCL]

In the first decades of the 20th century, the Swiss engineer Robert Maillart (1872-1940) developed a series of inventive structures based on a renewed vision of reinforced concrete. In so doing, he was among the first to invent a formal language that was truly adapted to reinforced concrete construction, which was still a new material at the time. Today, no one denies the considerable influence he had on structural engineering. He had an equal influence on architecture and his vision of reinforced concrete. At the beginning of his career, taking up the conceptual principles of the pioneers of reinforced concrete (Lambot, Hennebique, Mesnager), Maillart's structural forms liberated themselves from the structural schemes protected by the first patents. Later, Maillart went even further down this road, reinventing three-jointed arches, mushroom slabs and stiffened arches. Maillart is also an entrepreneur: specific construction methods, which enable the efficient realisation of these forms in particular contexts, are central to his research. When Robert Maillart produced truly innovative structural work in the early part of his career, between 1901 and 1925, it was met with hostility and much misunderstanding. While there is agreement on the relevance of the forms he promoted, his approach to design remains subject to debate, and to the same misunderstanding as that encountered by Maillart a century earlier. However, our modern theorems of plastic calculation theory give meaning to his daring mathematical methods based on simplicity. To this must be added a perhaps unprecedented use of Graphical Statics as a design tool, which allows the form of his works to be put into place. His methods, both graphical and conceptual, allow for an extremely visual and pragmatic approach to structural design, which allows for the development of particularly expressive and relevant structural models. In turn, the effectiveness of such simple methods in some ways calls into question the efficiency of the tools and methods adopted in structural engineering today. Starting from the author's research on Robert Maillart's design methods - which received the Benvenuto Prize in 2008 - the author will present the main results and explain the latest developments of his research. A 9k attendance online conference to Chinese architects and engineers.