To follow up on yesterday’s dramatic foreshadowing, I was in Lausanne last week for the 14th International Conference on Structural Analysis of Historic Constructions. I first attended the 4th conference, in 2004, in Padova, and have been to most of the conferences between.
The social aspects include the formal events nicely provided by the hosts – a reception, a dinner, tours – but also seeing people who don’t live near, and meeting people I would not otherwise meet. Given the topic, pretty much everyone I spoke to had a real interest and usually real experience with the intersection of structural engineering and historic preservation.
On the technical end, I presented a paper on what we know about the capacity of steel columns in old buildings based solely on the building’s age (spoiler: we know something but not everything). I’ll talk about that more in a few months when the proceedings are published.
I saw presentations of a number of good papers, and I look forward to reading them when I have the proceedings. Obviously, different people have different interests, so no one is going to be entirely interested in every paper. That issue combines well with the need to present hundreds of papers in only three days: there were several parallel tracks, so at any given time, you picked the track closest to your interests. On the first day, for example, I attended two sessions on 20th Century Heritage.
Whether you’re in academia or practice, conferences are a break from everyday routine rather than part of that routine. That said, having a single event that combines travel, learning, and schmoozing is fantastic.
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