PSI - Issue 29

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Structural Integrity Procedia 00 (2019) 000 – 000

www.elsevier.com/locate/procedia

ScienceDirect

Procedia Structural Integrity 29 (2020) 87–94

Art Collections 2020, Safety Issue (ARCO 2020, SAFETY) The Convent of Santa Teresa de Jesús in Havana: analysis, consolidation and restoration for the New Museum of Sacred Art

Michele Paradiso*, Sara Garuglieri, Viola Ferrarini Dipartimento di Architettura, Università di Firenze, Via della Mattonaia 14, 50121 Firenze, Itay

Abstract Thanks to an inter-university agreement between the University of Florence and the University College San Geronimo in La Habana, on the occasion of the Master's thesis in Architecture of Florence it was possible to approach the case study of the Convent of Santa Teresa del Jesús in La Havana (Cuba). The Convent, built in the early 1700s for the Order of the Discalced Carmelites, maintained its function until 1827 when, following the transfer of the nuns, it was first converted into Casas de Vecindad and subsequently into Ciutadela (1960) compromising consistently the integrity of the factory. Since 1998 it has become part of the list of risk sites “2000 World Monuments Fund” [WMF (2000)] and since 2005 it has undergone a careful and long process of restoration by the Oficina del Historiador da La Habana (OHCH). [WMF, (2020)] The work focused first on the constriction of a cognitive framework of the build ing aimed at a correct assessment of the historical evolutionary and metrological characteristics of the local construction system adopted. Then the geometric and cracking survey of a portion of the Convent corresponding to the first cloister, the oldest, was carried out by means of a direct and photogrammetric method, which showed some structural anomalies, highlighting a progressive subsidence in correspondence with the south -east corner of the cloister. According to the information provided by the relevant campaign, some tests were made on the foundations of the portion affected by the settlement. The analyzes carried out on the specimens have evidenced soils with a low cohesive capacity, sensitive to charges in humidity with consequent variation in their volume. In the same way, the analyzes on degradation pathologies have evidenced a sensitivity to the variation in the capillary humidity amount, as well as to the multiple anthropic alterations; furthermore, the analysis of the crack pattern has revealed a widespread and complex structural degradation leading to manifestation of collapse mechanisms of the second and third types in the intrinsically weakest points.

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +39-055-275-6852. E-mail address: michele.paradiso@unifi.it

2452-3216 © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) Peer-review under responsibility of Marco Tanganelli and Stefania Viti

2452-3216 © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) Peer-review under responsibility of Marco Tanganelli and Stefania Viti 10.1016/j.prostr.2020.11.143