Abstract

Unreinforced Masonry (URM) structures represent an ancient and sustainable housing technique intertwined with our artistic cultural heritage. Fostering their preservation and promoting their adaptive reuse not only raises awareness about our cultural heritage but also contributes to reducing the construction industry’s ecological footprint while mitigating land consumption. Due to their negligible tensile strength, URM structures adapt to external environmental changes, such as seismic events, landslides, or subsidence caused by tunnelling, reaching equilibrium in a deformed and fractured configuration.

By developing new computational methods and using modern technologies, it is nowadays possible to achieve highly accurate and quick (large-scale) assessments, meeting the time and budget constraints that engineers and architects face daily. This way, designing more targeted and less conservative interventions is possible, avoiding unnecessary work. This seminar will provide an overview of methods developed by the speaker and his colleagues in recent years for assessing URM structures, starting from the theoretical basis, going to computational approaches and concluding with a perspective on the integration of artificial intelligence and vision-based systems for real-time assessment of masonry constructions.

SPEAKER BIO :

Antonino Iannuzzo is an Assistant Professor in Solid and Structural Mechanics at the University of Sannio, appointed through the international Rita Levi Montalcini Programme, which funds his project, “A computational inverse-analysis framework to correlate pathologies in unreinforced masonry structures to complex boundary changes and assess their residual stability.” His research focuses on computational mechanics, particularly unilateral structures, energy-based methods, crack pattern identification, and the application of artificial intelligence in structural assessment.

In 2017, he earned his PhD in Structural Mechanics from the University of Naples Federico II, where he developed novel methods for modelling crack patterns in historic masonry structures. Following his PhD, he joined the P.LIN.I.V.S. Centre in Naples, applying these methods to large-scale seismic assessments of historic buildings. Later, as a Postdoctoral Researcher at ETH Zurich within the Block Research Group, he coordinated research for an SNSF -funded project on masonry structures and contributed to developing open-source tools for COMPAS Masonry—a framework for assessing historic and designing new masonry structures. In 2022, he served as a Senior Lecturer at Swinburne University, Melbourne, advancing no-tension design methods. Since 2019, he has also been an invited teacher at the International Summer School on Historic Masonry Structures (HIMASS).