New experimental stone buildings: research, teaching and construction

This work describes a research on structural stone construction, launched over 15 years ago by the research group "Architecture and city of stone" of the Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture Sciences (DICAR) of the Polytechnic of Bari directed by the professor Claudio D'Amato. Herein below are exhibited two case studies: the first represents an experimental work designed and effectively built, the second is a final thesis project that reflects and amplifies the compositional and structural issues of the work previously explained. This project is the headquarter of the offices of the French company SNBR (Société Nouvelle le Bâtiment Régional) located in Troyes (FR), which deals with the major renovations of French historic monuments. The building is composed by 4 parallel diaphragms stone unarmed arches of about 20 meters of dimension that support a large wooden roof. The entrance of the building is composed by a unique portal of pre-compressed stone as an hyperbolic paraboloid sustained by only two shaped concrete supports. The final thesis project, reflecting on the issues already experienced in the building of Troyes, is a large domed structure as a spherical cap composed by 14 stone bearing arches of a maximum diameter of 58 meters, that are pre-compressed using sliding pre-tensed steel cables, that intersect at right angles in order to form a circular grid-based covered by a series of hyperbolic paraboloids of armed/translucent stone. The project, designed as multi-functional hub in the port area of Fiumicino, is a stone rethinking of the famous project of Félix Candela designed for the competition for the realization of the Velódromo de Anoeta in 1972. The aim of this work is to emphasize on the one hand the great morphological-structural potentialities of the structural stone, on the other hand to highlight the importance of shape resistant structures for a didactic based on constructive practice.