ISMES, CESI’s civil engineering company, has decades of experience in structural diagnostics and monitoring of cultural heritage and historical buildings protection, having developed more than 200 projects on the most important sites in Italy (e.g. the leaning tower of Pisa, St. Mark’s Basilica, the Chapel of the Holy Shroud), and internationally (e.g. The Temple of Luxor, Mexico’s Metropolitan Cathedral).
Protecting cultural heritage is a complex matter which entails different aspects:
- Structural behavior: over time structural materials suffer weathering and deterioration of their mechanical properties. Such behavior must be monitored to schedule maintenance activities and guarantee structural safety conditions.
- Maintenance and restoration: culturally significant structures deteriorate over time and need to be maintained and restored. Monitoring helps engineers to predict when restoration activities will be needed, helping owners to plan their investments.
- Site conditions: structural instability can be caused by site seismicity, variations in soil-bearing capacity and geomorphological conditions, as well as deterioration of foundation structures over time. Monitoring helps to avoid damage to buildings and can help engineers to plan remediation actions.
ISMES can manage all aspects of cultural heritage monitoring – developing, implementing and managing monitoring systems to guarantee safeguarding of any heritage architectural building
