Vergessene Ingenieure. Die Schalenbau-Pioniere der Russischen Avantgarde.

Forgotten Engineers. Shell-Pioneers of the Russian Avantgarde

On the occasion of the 125th birthday of Franz Anton Dischinger (1887-1953), october 18.-19. an international symposium "Pioneers of shell-construction - Shell Pioneers" took place at Wedding-campus of Berlin University of Technology. It was organised by Prof. Dr. Werner Lorenz and Dr. Roland May (BTU Cottbus) in cooperation with Prof. Dr. Mike Schlaich (TU Berlin). It started with Roland May's lecture about the life's work of the German shell-pioneer Franz Dischinger prior to the conference and as one of the serial lectures on "Practice und Potentials of Construction History". The next day this report was followed by some more reports from Italy, Spain and Belgium about shell-constructions of the 20th century. The organisers managed to present the whole story of shell-construction from the initial test constructions of the shell-pionneers at the german Dyckerhoff and Widmann concrete company (Dywidag), Franz Dischinger and his partner Ulrich Finsterwalder (1897-1988) and Anton Tedesco (1913-95), as well as the spanish-mexican-US-american architect Felix Candela (1910-97), the Italian Pierre Luigi Nervi (1891-1979), Eduardo Torroja (1899-1961) from Spain as well as Eugène Léon Freyssinet (1879-1962) and Bernard Lafaille (1900-55) up to current shell-structures of Schlaich, Bergermann and Partner - Engineers.
The reason for this essay is to add some information about what happenend in the Soviet Union in the field of stressed skin construction during that time. The efforts of the Russian avant-garde engineers were mentioned within the conference, but not properly introduced in order to balance their input and evaluate their important role in the international development of stressed skin construction. The reason for this was, that not a single native researcher in the field of the History of shell-construction in the former Soviet Union could be identified in Russia. Researching the History of shell-construction in the former Soviet Union remains a scientific desire since ever.