top of page

HISTORIC MASONRY STRUCTURES 

Picture2.png
arch-drawing.png

TEACHERS

Maurizio Angelillo

Professor at Università degli Studi di Salerno

Maurizio Angelillo is Professor of Statics and Strength of Materials at the School of Engineering and Architecture of the “Università degli Studi di Salerno”. Architect and structural expert with multi-disciplinary research interests including masonry mechanics, and Biomechanics, trained in Architecture at the University of Neaples and in Mechanics at the University of Minnesota, he and his group are actively working on the kinematics and on the equilibrium of masonry buildings. Angelillo, who is the Editor and the co-author of the CISM books “Mechanics of Masonry Structures” and “Discrete Computational Mechanics of Masonry Structures”, works on unilateral models for masonry since the early 80s, being the author of more than 50 papers on the application of these models to real masonry structures and masonry elements such as arches, domes, vaults and spiral stairs.

Angelillo,M.JPG

01

Professor

Philippe Block

02

Block,P.jpg

Professor

Professor at ETH Zurich

Paolo Borin

Lecturer at University of Brescia

Borin.jpg

03

Assistant Professor

Alessio Bortot

04

Foto Bortot.jpg

Professor

Professor at Università di Trieste

Alessio Bortot, an Architect and a “Doctor Europaeus” since 2016 in Architecture, City and Design, with a specialization in Representation, is Associate Professor at the Department of Engineering and Architecture in the University of Trieste since 2021.

He has been professor for the course of “Descriptive geometry”, “Advanced technologies for representation” and “Digital 3D modelling” at the IUAV University of Venezia, at the faculty of Engineering of the University of Padova, at the IED of Venice and at the École National Supérieure des Travaux Publics in Yaoundé (Camerun). He has participated to national (PRIN 2010-2011) and international research projects (James Turrell. Roden Crater Project – Florence 2007; Jean François Niceron. Prospettiva, catottrica e magia artificiale – Rome 2013.

Gianmarco de Felice

Professor at Università degli Studi Roma Tre

Gianmarco de Felice is professor of structural engineering at the Department of Engineering of Roma Tre University. He is coordinator of the PhD school in Civil Engineering at Roma Tre University, chairmen of the RILEM Technical Committee TC-250 CSM “Composites for Sustainable strengthening of Masonry” and member of the drafting Committee of the Charter of Rome on the Resilience of Art Cities to Natural Catastrophes. He has been the scientific coordinator for the design of engineering projects on heritage conservation and structural rehabilitation, such as the restoration of the Farnese Palace in Ischia di Castro and that of the Abbey of San Clemente in Casauria supported by the World Monuments Fund and awarded by the Domus International Prize for Restoration and Conservation.

Felice,G.jpg

05

Professor

Paula Fuentes González

Professor at Universidad de Alcalà

06

Paula_f_edited.jpg

Professor

Santiago Huerta

Professor at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Santiago Huerta is a professor of Structural Design at Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM). President of the Spanish Construction History Society (SEDHC). Work as consultant for Historical Constructions Analysis (Cathedrals of Mallorca; Santiago de Compostela; Lonja de Mallorca; San Juan de los Reyes, etc.). Director of publications of the Juan de Herrera Institute. Author of more than 80 publications: books (editor), articles and papers, mainly on historic masonry structures and Construction History. Prize for the ‘Dissemination of Architecture’ related to the Exhibition and Catalog Guastavino Co. the Reinvention of the Vault (COAM), 2003. Telford Gold Medal of the British Civil Engineers Association London, 2011.

Huerta,Santiago.jpg

07

Professor

Antonino Iannuzzo

Tenured Assistant Professor at University of Sannio

08

image.png

Assistant Professor

Antonino Iannuzzo is a structural engineer. He completed his Ph.D. in 2017 with a dissertation on “A new rigid block model for masonry structures”. Antonino’s research during his Ph.D. work focused on models for the static, kinematic and dynamic analysis of masonry elements and structures modelled as continua composed of Normal Rigid No-Tension material. During the academic year 2017-18 he worked as a post-doctoral researcher on “large scale assessment of ordinary masonry buildings under seismic actions” at the P.LIN.I.V.S. Study Centre for Hydrogeological, Volcanic and Seismic Engineering, whose scientific coordinator is Prof. Giulio Zuccaro, and joined the Block Research Group at ETH Zurich as a post-doctoral researcher, for three years: 2018-21. He is currently a Tenured Lecturer at UniSannio.

John Ochsendorf

Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Ochsendorf,J.jpg

09

Professor

TILE VAULT TEACHERS

Carlos Martín

01

Carlos Martín_edited.jpg

Master MAson

Master Mason

Vault builder and master plasterer, he has been involved in the construction and restoration of more than 300 vaults to date. He is the founder of Bóvedas Hispanas, a company specializing in the construction and restoration of vaults, working on numerous projects, including some of the most important in Spain in the last 30 years. He is a Professor of vault workshops at a national and international level and the author of several publications on plaster and vaulted structures.

Outstanding works. Vaulted vault in the Chapel of the Seminary of the Santos Niños Justo y Pastor de Alcalá de Henares (Madrid); Structural vaults of the Aljibe of the castle of Jadraque (Guadalajara) and in the cellar of the Valdemonjas de Quintanilla (Valladolid); Gothic vaults in stone in the Monastery of Pelayos de la Presa (Madrid); Vaults and domes in the Colegio San Basilio Magno de Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), in the Convent of San Juan de la Penitencia de Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), in the sacristy of Loeches (Madrid) and in the Chapel of San Felipe de Novelda (Alicante). He has participated as a builder in the Venice Architecture Biennale of 2016, executing a contemporary vaulted ceiling in collaboration with MIT (Prof. John Ochsendorf), with the design of Sir Norman Foster.

Esther Redondo

Professor at European University of Madrid

Esther Redondo_edited.jpg

02

Professor

HOST TEACHERS

Antonio Cazzani

01

AC_0780 (1).jpg

Professor

Professor at Università Degli Studi di Cagliari

M.Sc. CE (with full honors) at Technical University of Milan, Antonio Cazzani is a Full Professor of Structural Mechanics at the University of Cagliari, where he is teaching Structural Mechanics in both school of Architecture and Civil Engineering. Previously he has been for 20 years Assistant Professor and Associate Professor at University of Trento, teaching there Structural Mechanics, Structural Dynamics, Structural Stability and Computational Mechanics. He has been involved in several research projects, for some of them acting as PI or Associated PI, and has authored more than 55 papers published in international journals. His research interests span between Computational Mechanics, Masonry Structures, Laminated Plates, Shells, Structural Stability and Dynamics. He has been Visiting Scholar for several times at Georgia Tech, in Atlanta, GA, and more recently in 2018 and in 2020 at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, FL. He has been supervisor of many M.Sc. students and of some Ph.D. students.

Maria Cristina Porcu

Associate Professor at Università Degli Studi di Cagliari

02

cp.jpeg

Associate Professor

INVITED LECTURERS

Matthew DeJong

01

Matt%20DeJong%202019_square_edited.jpg

Professor at Berkeley University of California

Matthew DeJong is a Professor in Structural Engineering, Mechanics and Materials at University of California, Berkeley. He was a university lecturer in Structural Engineering and a Fellow and Director of Studies in Engineering at St Catharine’s College. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the Technical University of Delft and completed his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He holds an undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Davis, and worked as a structural design engineer in California. His research interests lie broadly in the field of structural engineering, but are primarily focused in the areas of earthquake and masonry structures.

Professor

Aguinaldo Fraddosio

Professor at Polytechnic University of Bari

Aguinaldo Fraddosio, Ph.D., is a structural engineer and associate professor of “Scienza delle Costruzioni” at the Department of Architecture Construction and Design (ArCoD) of the Polytechnic University of Bari.

His research activity, developed within an established network of Italian and international scholars, is focused on fundamental and applicative issues of solids, structural, and experimental mechanics. His research interests in historic masonry constructions concern advanced applications of the lower bound theorem of limit analysis for corbelled structures, arches, vaults, and domes; dynamics of curved masonry constructions; advanced strengthening techniques; damage characterization. On these subjects, he performed both theoretical and experimental research. Moreover, he studies stability and bifurcation in finite elasticity; advanced ultrasonic approaches for mechanical characterization of materials; acoustoelasticity; tensegrity structures; innovative approaches for structural dynamic identification; vibro-impact dampers for seismic protection of structures. He is the principal investigator in research projects on existing and historical structures, seismic metamaterials, and non-linear ultrasonic techniques for damage characterization. He carries out an intense didactic activity, mostly at MSc and PhD level, also giving lectures and seminars for national and international courses.

image.png

02

Professor

José Lemos

03

image.png

National Laboratory for Civil Engineering (LNEC) 

Dr José Lemos is a Principal Researcher at the National Laboratory for Civil Engineering (LNEC) in Lisbon, Portugal. He holds a Civil Engineering degree from the University of Porto and a PhD in Rock Mechanics from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He has been involved in the development of the discrete element codes UDEC and 3DEC. His research interests include dam foundations in rock, seismic analysis of masonry structures and discrete element modelling.

Professor

Nicola Nodargi

Assistant Professor at of Rome Tor Vergata

04

Nicola A. Nodargi is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Civil Engineering and Computer Science of the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy. He received his M.Sc. degree in Civil Engineering and his M.Sc. degree in Mathematics from the same university, where he earned his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering in 2016. His Ph.D. thesis was selected as a finalist for the 2016 ECCOMAS Best Ph.D. Thesis award and was recognized with the 2016 GIMC Best Ph.D. Thesis award and the 2017 ECCOMAS Best Ph.D. Presentation award. As a Postdoctoral researcher, he was a visiting scholar at the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany. His research activity, framed in the field of computational mechanics, focuses on the development of computational strategies for the analysis of structures exhibiting material and geometric nonlinearities, with a particular interest in the static and dynamic response of historical masonry constructions.

image.png

Assistant Professor

Paulo Lourenco

05

Professor

Professor at the University of Minho

Professor at the Department of Civil Engineering, University of Minho, Portugal. Experienced in non-destructive testing, advanced experimental and numerical techniques, innovative repair and strengthening techniques, and earthquake engineering. President of ICOMOS ISCARSAH - International Scientific Committee on the Analysis and Restoration of Structures of Architectural Heritage. Specialist in structural conservation and forensic engineering, with work on 200 monuments, including 20 UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Revision leader of the European masonry code (EN 1996-1-1). Coordinator of the MSc on Structural Analysis of Monuments and Historical Constructions, with alumni from 75 countries and European Heritage / Europa Nostra Award. Editor of the International Journal of Architectural Heritage, Taylor & Francis. Author of “Historic Construction and Conservation” and “Finite Element Analysis for Building Assessment”, Routledge (2019 and 2022). Supervised 80 PhD theses and coordinated multiple national and international research projects. Awarded a European Research Council Grant to develop an integrated seismic assessment approach for heritage buildings. Coordinator of a European Doctoral Network with 15 PhD students on sustainable building lime applications.

LECTURERS and TUTORS

Marialuigia Sangirardi

01

Research Associate at University of Oxford

IMG_0411.jpg

Lecturer

Alessandro Dell'Endice

Post-Doctoral Researcher at ETH Zurich

02

DellEndice_Alessandro_edited.jpg

Lecturer

Amal Gerges

03

Gerges_ELI_0195_edited.jpg

Research Fellow

Research Fellow at Università Degli Studi di Cagliari

Amal Gerges holds a Ph.D. in Architecture and Civil Engineering from the University of Cagliari, along with a Doctor Europeaus certificate. with a dissertation titled Modelling Masonry as a Continuum: Finite Element Analysis Using Abaqus. Her research primarily focused on the stability of masonry structures under static and dynamic loads, a key aspect of her work is the study of masonry as a continuum, aiming to bridge the gap between limit analysis-based methods and the finite element environment.

She is currently a postdoctoral researcher on a national funded project focusing on the evaluation of the structural behaviour of Nuragic architecture at the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering at the University of Cagliari. During a study period at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM), she worked under the supervision of Prof. Santiago Huerta, investigating limit analysis methods to predict the behaviour of masonry structures.

Previously, she worked on construction and rehabilitation projects in Lebanon and Syria. She has also been actively involved in tutoring and conducting seminars for courses on Dynamics of Structures and Seismic Engineering. 

Pietro Meriggi

Lecturer at Università Roma Tre

Pietro_edited.jpg

04

Assistant Professor

Andrea Montanino

05

Andrea_Montanino_edited.jpg

Lecturer

Lecturer at University of Naples "Federico II"

Fabian Bernal Orozco Barrera

Lecturer at National Autonomous University of Mexico

Fabian is an architect who specializes in masonry vaults and domes, using static thrust line techniques to assess the safety in ancient masonry buildings. He studied in the Nacional Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) through a master’s degree in Restoration with the thesis “Methodological proposal for the conservation of Vaults and Domes in view of earthquakes”. He did a research stay at the Polytechnic University of Madrid under Professor Santiago Huerta. Currently he is a structures professor at the Faculty of Architecture in UNAM, collaborating as an Independent researcher. He works as an active consultant on the assessment of Masonry Structures in Mexico for private and public entities since 2020. He has worked on restoration projects and retrofitting of masonry buildings. He has conducted the surveys of the case studies for the Summer School on Historic Masonry Structures 2021 also participating as teaching assistant.

06

Fabian_image_edited.jpg

Lecturer

Vittorio Paris

07

Vittorio_Paris.jpg

Assistant Professor

Lecturer at Università di Bergamo

Giulia Piccinin

Giulia Piccinin is a research associate at Università Iuav di Venezia in Architecture, city and design. She has been research fellow at Università Iuav di Venezia and Duke University (North Carolina, USA) and tutor at Politecnico di Milano and Università Iuav. She also held guest lectures at Venice International University. Her researches are focused on the field of Representation of Architecture and Digital Survey. Among her publications: Geometria e costruzione. Stereotomia e configurazione in architettura,  J. Calvo-López, A. Bortot, G. Piccinin (edited by), Roma 2020; La vertigine dello sguardo: la scala elicoidale di Palazzo Mannajuolo, A. De Rosa, G. D’Acunto, G. Piccinin, Padova 2019. 

08

s200_giulia.piccinin.jpg

Research Associate

Felix Rodriguez

09

Felix_Rodriguez TRIM.jpg

Lecturer

Consultant at GV408 studio and Lecturer at European University of Madrid​

Félix Rodríguez is an architect specialized on structural analysis, currently working as a consultant for GV408 studio and as a lecturer on structural design at European University of Madrid.

He completed his BSc in 2021 and his MSc in 2023 at Escuela Técnica Superior de Madrid, where he specialized on historical masonry structures and thrust line analysis, writing his bachelor thesis on the interventions and structural analysis of San Fernando church in Mexico under the supervision of Santiago Huerta, he has taken part as an assistant on the tile vaulting workshop at Polytechnic University of Madrid  and as a tutor in the previous editions of the Summer School on Historic Masonry Structures.

Félix Rodríguez is an architect specialized on structural analysis, currently working as a consultant for GV408 studio and as a lecturer on structural design at European University of Madrid.

He completed his BSc in 2021 and his MSc in 2023 at Escuela Técnica Superior de Madrid, where he specialized on historical masonry structures and thrust line analysis, writing his bachelor thesis on the interventions and structural analysis of San Fernando church in Mexico under the supervision of Santiago Huerta, he has taken part as an assistant on the tile vaulting workshop at Polytechnic University of Madrid  and as a tutor in the previous editions of the Summer School on Historic Masonry Structures.

Teaching Assistants

Tvrtko Renić

Research Associate at the University of Zagreb

Tvrtko Renić is a postdoctoral researcher at University of Zagreb, Faculty of Civil engineering where he has been working at the department for strucures since 2017 on research and teaching in the feild of new and existing concrete and masonry structures. He received his PhD in structural engineering at University of Zagreb in 2022. His main fields of interest are seismic analysis and design, existing masonry structures, strengthening methods, graphical methods of analysis and design and use of non-metallic reinforcement. He is part of a research project that aims to study typical unreinforced masonry buildings in Zagreb with emphasis of their assessment and post-earthquake retrofitting.

01

photo_Tvrtko.jpg

Research Fellow

Martina Buzzetti

02

Picture1.png

PhD Student

PhD Student Politecnico di Milano

Álvaro Díaz

Álvaro Díaz will graduate from a Bachelor’s Degree in Architecture in June, after presenting his final thesis in the area of masonry structures. His strongest interest in the field of architecture is precisely the study of Historic Masonry Structures, as well as general Structural Calculation and Design of any other kind of structure.

He has collaborated with the Department of Structures of his University in the assessment of the structural safety of a damaged parking building in the centre of Madrid. He has taken intensification courses in Masonry Structures and Tiled Vaults under the teaching of Professor Santiago Huerta, who will also tutor his final thesis. He has also participated in various Workshops consisting of building different typologies of tiled vaults, arches and domes with the master mason Carlos Martin. He participated in the last edition of this Summer School (2024) as a student.

03

CARA.JPG

Student

Natalia Pingaro

04

Picture2.png

PhD Student

PhD Student at Politecnico di Milano

bottom of page