Taking care of heritage, a challenge for geotechnical engineers

When dealing with monuments or historic sites, engineers may find themselves out of the comfort zone bounded by balance and congruence, being necessary to have an approach guided not only by technical convenience and cost effectiveness, but above all from the need to preserve at the best whatever is the heritage carried by the specific structure under analysis. Such a lack of comfort has to be the guiding light in sharing the solution with experts from other fields, as clearly suggested by Article 2 of the Venice Charter. This paper reports on three case histories taken from the author’s personal experience, related to the heritage of completely different ltural environments (respectively Maya, Greek-Roman and Byzantine-Ottoman), in which these constraints had to be faced from the point of view of a geotechnical engineer. The role played by geotechnical engineering differs from case to case, but the examples presented herein demonstrate that, far from being sufficient, our discipline is most times necessary. It is argued that, even though the best technical solution is always the least invasive one, geotechnical engineers should not be scared a priori by the possibility of interacting with historic structures, as long as their intervention is informed, necessary, respectful and above all aimed to contribute in preserving the true essence of heritage, which is not the structure in itself but the role it has in its physical and social environment.