Robert Maillart
(1872- 1940).
“ The Concept of Whole and
Ultimate and the era of Bridges”
Professor Khaled Dewidar
Professor of Architecture
British university
Egypt
• By the early twentieth century, reinforced
concrete became an acceptable substitute in
construction for all previous structural materials,
such as stone, wood, and steel
• Robert Maillart had an intuition and genius that
exploited the aesthetic of concrete.
Beautiful and daring Structures that
reflect the lines of force and their
distribution in the structure.
• Robert Maillart was a Swiss civil engineer who revolutionized the
use of reinforced concrete with such designs:
• The three-hinged arch
• The deck-stiffened arch for bridges.
• The beamless floor slab
• The mushroom column for industrial buildings.
• The maximum use of materials
•
His radical use of reinforced concrete
revolutionized concrete architecture
and its typologies
• His Salginatobel (1929–1930) and Schwandbach (1933) bridges changed the
aesthetics and engineering of bridge construction dramatically and influenced
decades of architects and engineers after him.
Maillart Contribution in Structural Analysis
• 1) "method of joints," permits the
determination of stresses in all known
members of a truss if two forces are known.
• 2) "method of sections," by developing a very
simple formula for determining the forces in
the members intersected by a cross-section.
• 3) "method of graphics,"
Design Principles in Structures:
• 1) Simple structural analysis, so that
appropriate assumptions could be made
based on common sense.
• 2) To consider carefully the construction
process of the structure, not just the final
product.
• 3) The last principle was to test a structure
with full-scale load tests.
The Revolutionary Bridges of
Robert Maillart:
• Robert Maillart built some of the greatest bridges
of the 20th century.
• His designs elegantly solved a basic engineering
problem: how to support enormous weights using
a slender arch.
Just as railway bridges were the great structural symbols of
the 19th century, highway bridges became the engineering
emblems of the 20th century.
The invention of the
automobile created an
irresistible demand for
paved vehicular bridges
throughout the developed
world.
• The master of this new building typology and
reinforced concrte was Swiss structural engineer,
Robert Maillart.
Maillart developed a unique method for designing
bridges.
1) He rejected the decorative approach taken by many
bridge builders of his time.
2) He resisted imitating architectural styles and adding
design elements solely for ornamentation.
3) He rejected the complex mathematical analysis of
loads and stresses.
4) He had a desire for conceiving new shapes to solve
classic engineering problems
Maillart’s method was a form of
creative intuition.
Structures
and
Economy
1) The Zuoz Bridge:
• Maillart’s first important bridge in the Swiss
town of Zuoz.
• Spanning 30 meters
His innovation was incorporating the bridge’s arch
and roadway into a form called the hollow-box arch
•
which would substantially reduce the
bridge’s expense by minimizing the
amount of concrete needed.
Thin Arch and with 2
box sections
In a conventional arch bridge:
1) The weight of the roadway is transferred by columns to the arch,
which must be relatively thick.
2) In Maillart’s design, the roadway and arch were connected by
three vertical walls, forming two hollow boxes running under the
roadway.
The big advantage of this design was that the
arch would not have to bear the load alone, it
could be much thinner.
2) The Tavanasa Bridge (1905)
• His first masterpiece, Maillart removed the
parts of the vertical walls which were not
essential because they carried no load.
3) The Flienglibach Bridge (1923)
• His most important breakthrough during this
period was the development of the deck-
stiffened arch, the first example of which was
the Flienglibach Bridge.
• An arch bridge is somewhat like an inverted
cable.
• A cable curves downward when a weight pulls it
up the created form curves upward to support
the roadway.
For aesthetic reasons, Maillart wanted a thinner arch
and his solution was to connect the arch to the
roadway with transverse walls
4) Salginatobel Bridge (1930):
• The concrete hollow box design became a major
bridge building concept.
• The concrete arch ring and the concrete deck are
joined by longitudinal concrete sidewalls, giving
the structure the cross-section of a hollow box.
5) The Mushroom Columns:
• Maillart is known also for his revolutionary
mushroom column design in a number of
buildings.
• He constructed his first mushroom ceiling for a
warehouse in Zurich
• He treated the concrete floor as a slab, rather
than reinforcing it with beams.
"the most rational and more beautiful
European buildings".
The Mushroom Structure
His revolutionary mushroom ceiling was first constructed in
Switzerland and Instead of reinforcing the concrete floor with
beams, Maillart treated it as a flat slab and shaped the column
capitals in such a way that the forces would flow smoothly,
providing an elegant and efficient shape.
Mushroom
Columns
and Lines of
Forces
Building as a
Mushroom Form
Decorated Mushroom Column
in Steel
Interpretation of the
Mushroom in Concrete
Slender Arches:
The Concept of :
Hole, Whole and Ultimate
Elegance in Structural Design
Conclusion
• A slender, lighter-looking form.
• Aesthetics based on the concept of wholeness
and the ultimate usage of the materials,
• Thinner arches counter balancing the weight
of the road.
• Visual Appearance of the Arch.
• No massive structures.
• Mushroom Columns
Hollow-Box
Structure System
Visual Appearance of Deck Stiffed Arched Bridges:
Lightness
and
Slenderness
of Structures
Montaza Bridge
Alexandria
The Mushroom Column In Egypt
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