Category: Editorial

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I think that the research directions of our discipline, as they have been outlined in the last years starting from their historically determined framework, can be associated with two categories borrowed from Piero Zanini1, the “border” and the “frontier”. They become the organizing criteria through which we can reinterpret outcomes and development perspectives of these studies.
According to Zanini, the “border” “indicates a common limit, a separation between contiguous spaces; it is also a way to peacefully establish everyone’s right of ownership over a territory”. Thinking of a border and building a fence means inventing a field and enclosing it, highlighting its size, shape, and functions.
I believe the research that many of us are undertaking reveals the different ways of coping with the concept of border.
In a first interpretation, the border defines a known research field within which to explore its limits, always moving in a familiar territory that unequivocally leads back to a comfort zone. This confidence is a guarantee of a high level of knowledge of the field itself and reaffirms its “robustness”, even at the risk of falling into the cliché of déjà fait, déjà vu.
As the boundary becomes closer and closer, a second interpretation takes shape, leading to the perception of the border as too binding for the operational environment. As a result, this situation leads some researchers to go further, opening up gaps into neighboring disciplinary territories, thus facing the challenge – and the risk – of not always being relevant if they fail to “place all the information correctly” not only “in their own context” but also outside it2. The uncertain awareness with which the territories of complexity concerning this challenge are explored results in an adventure within different disciplinary fields. The scientific paradigm, entirely focused on the method, is not sufficient to guide this research; making the interweaving intelligible through the aid of simulations rather than experiments does not seem sufficient to restore its multiple facets and hybrid nature. This mainly happens when the attention is limited to topics whose scientific relevance should embrace the dimension of the exception – further accumulator of complexity3 – and not of the rule.
All this implies that research developed in several fields must start from here and bring a rethinking of the disciplinary field. A rethinking that introduces, in fact, a new condition of otherness able to cross our boundaries and at the same time preserve them from the risk of reaching a state of foreignness, trespassing, or ambivalence, which can also lead to the insidious misunderstanding of the “coexistence of two statements (I am this and that)”.
Then I would like to recall the Italian-French movie “La legge è legge” (The law is the law) starring Fernandel, in the role of an honest and responsible French customs officer and Totò in the role of a Neapolitan smuggler. The events, set on the French-Italian border in the imaginary town of Assola, show the character played by Fernandel as the victim of a comedy of misunderstanding: from being a respected French citizen, he first becomes an Italian outcast, and then a stateless person, and as such, unwanted by the authorities of both countries. However, the vicissitudes he goes through result from a deception: the old owner of the inn, in which the protagonist was born, is located precisely on the border itself. The innkeeper had arbitrarily moved the Italian borderline from one room to another to attract more tourists, thus transforming Fernandel, born in French land, into a fake Italian. The deception is revealed thanks to the smuggler Totò, who finds two bottles of wine of different vintages on whose labels are depicted the two different borderlines. At that point, the old innkeeper is scolded by the smuggler, who tells him: “are you crazy? Don’t you know that you can’t move the borders!”
The Neapolitan actor’s statement may be approved or not; however, I believe that moving a boundary is not always a legitimate operation and, in any case, complex.
The border, intended in the sense with which I proposed this kind of reasoning, can instead welcome the theme of ambivalence only in terms of reflection, of articulation of right questions, as Pascal4 himself reports. Considering that frequently what was true on one side of the Pyrenees was no longer true beyond them, he recognizes the need to know what there is in common between the two slopes of the same mountain system and, if anything, what it is and where is the truth that lies “beyond”.
It is necessary to introduce the concept of “frontier” to continue with the categories adopted by Piero Zanini. According to the architect, “the frontier represents the end of the Earth, the ultimate limit beyond which to venture”; to cross the frontier “means leaving a familiar, known, reassuring space and entering that of uncertainty”.
The frontier contains within itself the noun “fronte” (front). It refers in its etymology both to “affrontare” (facing), which implies the need to discuss with the other, and “fronteggiare” (confronting), which gives the possibility, in a challenging dimension, to overcome known boundaries, suggesting the direction and progression of change.
Unlike border, frontiers do not require being inside or outside a delineated territory, but instead occupying a strip of that extreme territory. In this unordered liminal space, everything often blurs and mixes without attribution of belonging to inside or outside categories; this is “the place where the norm, the rule that border establishes no longer applies, the land where everyone must take care of himself and everything becomes possible”.
The frontier is therefore not configured as a physical limit but as a meso-space with no name whose thickness is given by margins that are never clear, nor univocally definable, nor even impenetrable. A meso-space in which to operate, trying to redetermine the discipline’s operational fields through an osmotic potential identified each time. The condition of anomie leads to giving up the established system of rules. Therefore, the research methodologies must be reinvented with respect to tailor-made strategies and tactics.
In this perspective, “the problem is not to open the frontiers between disciplines, but to transform what generates these frontiers: the organizing principles of knowledge”. Investigating knowledge’s operational fields represents an impervious and elitist path, tackled only by a few who have accepted the challenge of moving in unfamiliar contexts, betting on trans-disciplinarity although being aware of the longer wait for the achievement of certain outcomes.
What stated so far highlights an interpretation aimed at provoking deep thought and, I hope, an open debate within our disciplinary field, on its roots and perspectives, in a framework of a significant change of society, in view of the ongoing transformations induced by the actual contingency events. The adoption of both debated categories of “border” and “frontier” seems, in fact, functional to describe their condition of crisis, with respect to the firmness of the border and the exploration possibilities of the frontiers. Both aspects exemplify the two risk scenarios in which researchers can incur: to remain closed in their enclosure or to be foreigners in the land of others.
Nevertheless, the scenario I have tried to outline and emerging from the territories of knowledge explored here represents the prerequisite for orienting towards serendipity. If, breaking away from the beaten paths, the research fields do not still find shared canons that can group them in an organic form, if “we are used to placing the sign ‘Various’ on them, it is precisely here that we must penetrate”5.
Therefore, I would like to leave the conclusion of this reflection open by quoting Piero Zanini once again. He stated: “borders and frontiers are cultural constructions that can take on many different meanings. They are at the same time the affirmation and the negation of themselves and of the dichotomies and ambiguities that they determine […] The ambiguity of the boundaries is all here, and the unpredictability of our behaviors in front of them requires us, perhaps, to play with them: the boundary is there, but it cannot be seen. At least as long as we are in the middle of it”. Staying in the middle, nowadays more than ever, implies at least one awareness: the oscillation of our actions has an amplitude whose points of inversion are, on the one hand, aesthetic capitalism and, on the other hand, scientific capitalism. Both of them are rules and not exceptions of a society that trusts in the myth of the circular economy to find a possible way of salvation.

Notes

1 Zanini P (1997) Significati del confine. I limiti naturali, storici, mentali. Mondadori, Milano
2 Morin E (1999) La tête bien faite, trans. Lazzari S (2000), La testa ben fatta. Riforma dell’insegnamento e riforma del pensiero. Raffaello Cortina, Milano
3 Ceruti M, Bellusci F (2020) Abitare la complessità. La sfida di un destino comune. Mimesis, Milano-Udine
4 Pascal B (1669) Pensées, trans. Allason B (1936), Pensieri. Utet, Torino
5 Debray R (2010) Éloge des frontières, trans. Favetto GL (2012), Elogio delle frontiere. ADD editore, Torino

To the victims of the collapse of the bridge over the Polcevera river

The collapse of the bridge over the Polcevera river on August 14^th, 2018, triggered a profound rethinking of historical research in the field of structural construction. The bridge was one of the most iconic symbols of the Italian School of Engineering.

On the one hand, many doubts about its collapsing modes imposed with increased urgency the scientific ef- fort to study and carry out thorough historical research. On the other hand, the unawareness of the value of the Italian structural heritage, as well as of its construction experimentation, and average age, made its dissemina- tion among students and professionals, who will be in- volved in its future safeguarding, even more necessary. A thousand-stages tour de force, which was started to inform everyone about the cultural identity, the technical value, and the historical significance of the School of En- gineering, has not prevented a continuous, more private brooding related to the way of carrying out this research, so devoid of historiographic tradition.

Is our approach properly historical research? More- over, where does the history of structural engineering  fit into the broader overview of historiography? In 2005 Sergio Poretti included it in the history of construction, which he defined as the “material history of architec- ture”, referring to Eugenio Battisti, who already identi- fied the art of construction as a new frontier in the history of architecture in the 1980s1.

Nevertheless, Poretti recognized that studies on Italian structural engineering of the 1900s have never been part – or only marginally – of the history of archi- tecture. The truth is that these studies still need an es-

sential interpretative and critical synthesis operation to reconstruct their general framework; it is also true that this synthesis, as consolidated in all the more mature historiographies, must be based on the “slow, patient accumulation of precise surveys and specialist studies”. These are tiring, strenuous micro-stories that struggle  to find researchers interested in digging them out of the archives.

This is the primary concern about this research. For the usual atavistic problem: the engineer is not interested in history, in the past. He looks forward to the future, to the new.

However, in order to investigate Morandi’s or Zorzi’s intricate carpentry or Musmeci’s high-mathematical rela- tions, it is necessary to have an engineer’s education. An advanced education able to distinguish a hinge from a fixed joint, not because it is written in the technical reports but because it is evident from the geometry of the joint itself. The engineer must be able to recognize, in the still hand- written overly synthetic calculation reports, the starting hypotheses, skip the needless passages and understand the rough core of the conclusions. Moreover, the well-trained engineer should resist the temptation of recalculating old structures with modern software, the most useless hobby for a historian (necessary only for those who have to ver- ify and validate the current use – but this is a totally dif- ferent field) and instead make an effort to read the papers through the eyes of a pre-computer engineer, without eval- uating the project through modern parameters. He must, in brief, avoid the actualization typical of the “presentism” that affects traditional historiography as well. At the same time – and this is much more challenging – he has to know all the other histories connected to the construction: those of the materials, of the building site, of the construction companies, but also the political, economic, and social is- sues of the country where the work has been built.

There are no Degree Courses and related “Dublin De- scriptors” for these types of qualifications.

If they did exist, a branch of “Contemporary Dip- lomatics” would undoubtedly be compulsory teaching. What are the documents we are dealing with in our re- search? Are they “truthful”, i.e., are they what they claim to be? What do they precisely tell us? The dramatic re- cent events have required further reflection on this as well.

The historical work I have carried out in the last few years has dealt with peculiar documents that are rarely interesting for other researches. Working to reconstruct the history of reinforced concrete in Italy, I have thor- oughly examined, for example, the invention patents archive from its origins to the Second World War. Not searching for a specific patent attributed to a known au- thor, but merely going through all the ones relevant to the construction technique evolution. The history of the material has written itself: and not because the technique was a sequence of inventions but because the variation in density of patents dedicated to specific innovations has made the main stages of the entire process evident.

Moreover, most of the patents were deposited by un- known professionals who have remained so even after the investigation. Above all, in the patents there is no trace of their practical applications since they are often chimeras that are almost unachievable. Houses hanging like cloths from laundry threads – and therefore poten- tially unshaked by earthquakes – or hollow blocks for floors shaped like puzzle pieces, that should become resistant to tensile stress, even without rebar reinforce- ment. Nevertheless, from a statistical point of view, they provide a clear overview of the current debate and, there- fore, the evolutionary path of the materials.

This is not the only reason for which the patent is a peculiar document: the important ones, in fact, decisive for the history of the Italian School of Engineering, those of Nervi, for example, hide more than explain, general- ize instead of specifying, since the patent is intended to protect rights instead of providing instructions to those who want to copy the idea. However, for the construction historian, the patent is a “sound” document.

Other documents that crowd this research field are the official documents, protocolled, perhaps registered at the Court of Auditors. In order to find the dusty file of  a contract or a test certificate, we are willing to crouch uncomfortably, in a semi-abandoned dark archive, next to a dead mouse.

Yet the 122 pages of the “Report, minutes of visit and test certificate” for the construction work on the 24^th parcel of the Genoa-Savona motorway, two and a half kilometers long and including the bridge over the Pol- cevera, report that, compared to the contract signed in September 1961, when no one had even imagined how to build the cantilever brackets for the balanced trestles, the only project variants would have involved the use  of half-inch strands instead of the 7mm cable initially planned for all prestressing operations. A few well-cali- brated sentences by which the commission relieves itself of all responsibilities for the execution changes made on- site concerning the 20 preliminary drawings attached to the contract, while the final drawings would be over 400! The testing certificate has a completely different institu- tional scope, not that of explaining to the historian what truly happened during construction.

One more example: the drawings attached to the con- tract for the construction of the Risorgimento bridge had already been utterly outdated upon signing. The design- er Hennebique and the Porcheddu company, in October 1909, were already working on a new and completely different project but could no longer delay the signing. Is that “contract” a fake indeed? Of course not: the amend- ment during construction is a constant in our databas- es, but whichever researcher found only those drawings (and not those that were later realized, but which would never be validated by any formal signing) could com- pletely misunderstand the real conception and behaviour of the bridge.

There is another typical problem we are dealing with in this research: sources may have been filtered. Not nec- essarily what we do not find in an archive has never ex- isted.

This is especially true for the queen of sources, the one that makes our eyes blink the very instant we find it, but which we ought to take with a grain of salt: the building site picture. It seems a contradiction: the photo or video of the building site, when fortune shines, would seem the most incontrovertible proof of the way the work was built. Nonetheless, even the well-stocked collection can hide rather than show.

The digital scan of about 500 photographs repre- senting the bridge construction site over the Polcevera are archived in the SIXXIdata: more than 250 of them, from the Condotte company’s archive, linger from all perspectives on the temporary tie rods and the thousand work equipment – from the harp for the temporary deck prestressing to the cast-in-place form traveler – which are absent in the drawings. Nevertheless, the day after the collapse, some American newspapers published a series of photos by Mario De Biasi, extracted from their huge database, and dated August 1967. The photojour- nalist authored a few very famous shots, as “Gli italiani si voltano” (Italians turn around) and made reportages for the weekly magazine “Epoca”. De Biasi reached the 9^th pile early in the morning, dangerously climbed the stay, and reached the top of the antenna. Was he au- thorized or helped by someone, who knows? From up there, he took some unrepeatable images that document the construction site one month before the inaugura- tion. Five of those photos were then published in the August 13^th, 1967 issue of the magazine. One important shot is missing; the one that at the deck level shows      a handsome worker, striking a pose while working on one of the stays of the 9^th pile, just the stay that broke first. In the foreground, we can see a sheet metal cover wrapping the half-inch strands, which in the executive drawings are prescribed to be sheathed one by one. No document talks about this cover, no update of the draw- ings refers to this detail, no calculation considers this modification in progress.

Our photos skip from July 7^th directly to ribbon-cut- ting by Giuseppe Saragat on September 4^th: as if there was nothing to be documented in those two months of final acceleration of the construction site.

In short, the sources are “traces that the past has trans- mitted to the present and that we, therefore, find in the present”; they are not all we would like to know. And for the rest?

In the case of Polcevera, unfortunately, we have the autopsies of the bridge – the thin sections of exhibit 132 – which allow us to discover today all that has not been documented. However, we would obviously have all preferred that the bridge was still in place, perhaps after careful and timely maintenance that could have extended its life for many decades.

For all other chances, Manzoni explains: “la Storia è costretta a indovinare. Fortuna che c’è avvezza” (“it is a fact that History is doomed to guess everything. Luckily enough, it is used to that”)2.

 

Notes

¹ Poretti S (2005) Storia delle costruzioni e storia dell’architet- tura. In: Teoria e pratica del costruire: saperi, strumenti, modelli. Edizioni Moderna, Ravenna, vol. 1, pp 25–30.

² Manzoni A, I promessi sposi, cap. XIII.

Carlo Caldera
DISEG – Dipartimento di Ingegneria Strutturale, Edile e Geotecnica, Politecnico di Torino, Torino (Italy)

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This editorial is inspired by the topic of Congresso Colloqui.AT.e2019, by the preface of Book of Papers from Emilia Garda, Caterina Mele, Paolo Piantanida http://2019.artecweb.org/it/atti/ and by the principles divulged by Fritjof Capra https://www.fritjofcapra.net/

 

Editorial