Documentare, comprendere e conservare le eredità di Luigi Santarella / Documenting, Understanding and Preserving the Legacy of Luigi Santarella

This panel has brought together a group of scholars in the disciplines of engineering and architecture to discuss the figure of Luigi Santarella, offering interdisciplinary insights and concrete examples of how we might look at his work to better understand his legacy not only as a construction scientist and theorist or as a pioneer of reinforced concrete structures, but also as an educator committed to training a new generation of designers in such a founding period as the early Twentieth century. In line with the general topic of the Study Day and with the contributions from the invited speakers, this panel was designed to outline possible broader approaches for a further deepening of a well-known figure — but still not fully investigated in its complexity — as that of Santarella. Bringing together the points of view of Enzo Siviero (engineer and professor of Structural engineering at IUAV University), Giuseppina Uva (engineer and professor of Structural engineering at the Polytechnic University of Bari), Rita Vecchiattini (architect and professor of Architectural restoration at the University of Genoa), Aguinaldo Fraddosio (engineer and professor of Structural mechanics at the Polytechnic University of Bari) and Lorenzo Pietropaolo (architect and research professor in Architectural history at the Polytechnic University of Bari), panelists’ contribution suggests to further document and investigate Santarella’s work with a holistic approach so to address substantive issues — also in terms of training of the younger generations — such as the interaction between Architecture and Engineering in design processes or the urgent challenges to preserve reinforced concrete architectures of the Twentieth century. This means promoting specific communication and dissemination actions, and conceiving new research outlines on Santarella’s theoretical and built legacy that may intertwine historical and archival studies, methods and techniques for structural analysis, for conservation, restoration or adaptive reuse of reinforced concrete heritage.