My journey through heritage, engineering and SAHC
My journey through heritage, engineering and SAHC
If you are reading this, there is a decent chance you have wandered down a street and, despite all other distractions, you are gazing upward. You might be walking past restaurants, gardens or rivers, but your attention is repeatedly drawn to what may be a beautifully fenestrated Gothic façade, a Peruvian stone masonry wall with confoundingly precise joints, or a Moroccan minaret sheathed in intricate geometric motifs. If you look closely, you might notice a bricked-in arch that perhaps once led to a courtyard, or a line of larger, rougher stones along the base of a wall – remnants of an older foundation that may have supported a different structure.
To me, many cities around the world are like a palimpsest, an old document that has been written upon, erased and written on again – yet the earlier words never fully disappear. Our heritage buildings are integral to this layered document – they are quiet witnesses to generations of life, like characters in the story that a city tells about itself. Like you, my admiration of old buildings and my desire to understand them eventually drew me into a search for a structured programme that would teach me all I wanted to know. SAHC was the answer to my search.
Coming all the way from New Zealand, the idea of moving to Portugal for one year made me nervous; I had travelled and backpacked before, but I knew this would be quite different. However, the nerves were not nearly as much as the excitement, and any lingering nerves disappeared during the first week of classes. Meeting the professors, my classmates, and several SAHC graduates confirmed that I was now part of a community united by the same passion. The SAHC courses follow an overarching framework that involves learning the history and configuration of an existing building, inspecting and monitoring it, and modelling it digitally to understand its structural behaviour.
What I enjoyed most was the practical component in all the courses. Whether it was laboratory work, a site visit or the integrated seven-month capstone project, the SAHC curriculum makes sure you get fundamental hands-on practice. I have to admit, the coursework is full on – we were warned by other SAHC graduates about sleepless nights, and they weren’t wrong! But the passion and sincerity that the professors brought, combined with the camaraderie we developed as classmates, meant that the time spent learning was filled with enjoyment and warmth. Halfway into the coursework period, we had a Christmas dinner with the professors, and it already felt like being amongst extended family. Fast forward several months, and we were suddenly saying what felt like goodbye too soon to many of our classmates as they left for other cities for the dissertation.
My dissertation goals were to develop my skills in numerical modelling as a structural analysis tool and to develop a more nuanced understanding of masonry structural behaviour under seismic events, given that my home country is seismically active and contains a significant masonry building stock. I was fortunate to work on a dissertation about investigating the out-of-plane dynamic behaviour of an unreinforced masonry (URM) vertically spanning strip wall via numerical modelling – a pretty perfect convergence of my goals. Through this work, I developed an understanding of rocking dynamics and how to create and calibrate a detailed, numerical block-based model. The model was based on a real-life specimen used in an experimental campaign, and it was subjected to the same suite of earthquake ground motions used in that campaign. The model output was then processed using Python scripts to determine whether the modelling methodology could reliably predict the response behaviour observed in the experiments.
Following SAHC, I spent some extra time in Guimarães to extend the work of my dissertation. This work may contribute to updating existing guidelines for assessing URM walls, which felt like a great privilege to be part of. Then, after 15 months, I returned home to New Zealand. It was a mix of feelings being back – the joy of seeing my parents, closest friends and New Zealand’s beautiful landscapes again, the slight discomfort being somewhere inherently familiar but now a little different, and a kind of melancholic feeling I couldn’t explain towards my life in Portugal coming to an end. Maybe the Portuguese have the most appropriate word for this feeling: saudade.
I’ve since joined a consulting firm where I’m working on a mix of existing and new building projects. I find myself looking something up in the SAHC course content every so often and remembering my time there. SAHC strengthened both my technical and holistic understanding of heritage buildings with everything it taught me. While I was familiar with some concepts, others were completely new to me, and the programme consolidated everything into a logical flow. Equally importantly, I am grateful to have joined a global community of SAHC alumni. The memories and connections that I gained from completing the degree are something I will always carry with me.
SEE ALSO: What is like to be a SAHC student?
