La produzione laterizia per le grandi coperture industriali

In the years following the First World War, a new line of research was developed in Italy aimed at studying the collaboration between the reinforced concrete and brick in order to assign the latter a greater static function in the realization of horizontal planes. The systems, developed by brick manufacturing companies and tested by eminent scholars, were initially used for flat closures, but soon they were also adopted in the construction of lightweight vaulted system. With the same type of brick, in fact, beams could be quickly made with a prefixed curvature of length equal to a submultiple of that of the designed arch, allowing the rapid and inexpensive realization of vaults that had considerable span and reduced thickness. The RDB in Piacenza, the Frazzi Company in Cremona, the Morelli Patents in Ancona are among the manufacturing companies most involved in the development of such systems, starting from the curved beams in reinforced brick SAP to arrive at the lamellar vaults made with one of the Morelli patents, which allowed to realize roofs with simple curvature vaults, barrel and conoid, and with double curvature, bohemian vaults and hyperbolic paraboloids. These vaults, initially used in industrial building, still characterize many artifacts of Italian industrial heritage and they are evidence of high degree of constructive evolution reached in those years and of the research conducted on the nationally territory, both in relation to their structural possibilities and in their expressive potential.