The building and its structural history (or how the history is the source of endless technical knowledge)

Heedless to the repetition of catastrophic events that affect various places on earth, contemporary man often forgets that such events will strike again in the same places, bringing the same desperation to the population, the same loss of material assets and monuments, the erasure of collective identities and the suffering of other human beings. Convinced that modern progress and technique would remove all traumas of the past, mankind immediately activated processes aimed at compensating lost heritage, often without the consideration of the impact of such decisions, hurried and extraneous to their social context, on the population and the historical and natural environment. Previous generations, on the contrary, learnt in both a conscious and intuitive way from such experiences, devising continually improved solutions to protect the buildings that surrounded them, such as those built by their forefathers and the houses in which they carried out their daily life. They also understood that in order to mitigate the devastating action of earthquakes, ty-phoons and tsunamis, a balanced pact with nature had to be made: an equal give and take. As a result they put into practice techniques tried and developed over centuries, giving rise to build-ings which both ‘belonged’ to their surroundings and created a national identity, responding in a harmonious and coherent way to both climatic and environmental needs: such constructions made use of local materials and by artisans that had practiced their trades for centuries. But above all, man had learned that, when a system of building revealed some weakness, where a builder’s inexperience led him to commit some error, he would have to invent new solutions to improve inadequate structures, innovating, only to the degree necessary, in order to confirm what he had inherited from the past, and what he felt obliged to transmit to the future. In order to succeed he traditionally pursued two methods: prevention and the repair of damages. It is these two procedures that we wish to return to here in an effort to provide, in a contemporary setting, methodological tools for confronting and managing emergencies (before they happen) and consequences (after the destructive event), without losing the spirit and identity of place.