STK0201-The Evolution of Steel Structures in the History of Architecture

Description

Date: January 6, 2021, 21.00 UTC. Webinar

Estimated Time: 1 hr

Language: Spanish

Summary of the lecture

The Architect and Master in Civil Engineering, Nina Casas Guzik, accompanies us in this lesson to help us know the background of design and construction in steel structures, as well as the evolution in the management of these projects.

Iron-which had its origins around 1000 BC-played an important role in the history of architecture; however, it was not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that a radical transformation of the steel industry took place. With the arrival of the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century, cities grew demographically, new means of transport, greater productive forces, machinery and industries never seen before emerged. The construction activity in industrial cities intensified, existing architectural models were used to the limit of their possibilities, and it became necessary to generate an enormous amount of work that would require unprecedented forms and construction techniques.

At first, iron elements remained in the interior of the buildings, but soon they were used on the facades as expressive elements. Steel replaced cast iron and wrought iron due to reduced manufacturing costs. One of the most emblematic buildings of the time was the Eiffel Tower, completed in 1889, with a height of 300 meters and built entirely in steel. So then, for the time, steel was transformed into the new construction material, used in coatings, to later become what it is today, a material used in all types of construction.

The conference will be held in Spanish.

Speaker Introduction

M.I. Nina Casas Guzik

Architect and Master in Civil Engineering from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. She developed her master’s thesis at The School of Engineering of the National Autonomus University of Mexico (UNAM), with the test on a shake-table testing of a small-scale five-story confined masonry building The research received the international award for Outstanding Paper during the “13th North American Masonry Conference”, held in June 2019 in Utah, United States.

She developed two scientific research stays in structural engineering in 2010 and 2011, with a scholarship from the Mexican Academy of Sciences. She was the recipient of the first national place in the first and third “Concurso Interuniversitario de Modelación y Análisis Estructural” in 2012 and 2013 and won the “Premio a la Excelencia del Servicio Social y Práctica Profesional de la Facultad de Arquitectura” in 2012.

She worked for 6 years at Cafel Ingeniería participating in more than 60 structural projects. She currently works independently at Casas Guzik, where she performs structural engineering consulting.