Technical updates

From the firm's blog

Our articles are written in Italian; here is a short English summary of each.

Structural · Historic buildings

When an attic reveals the secrets of a building

A feasibility study for turning the attic of a 1926 load-bearing masonry block in Milan into flats became a much wider structural analysis. The 3D laser scanning survey revealed cracks near a stairwell, a column with a reduced section and load-bearing walls thinning out towards ground-floor piers 4.5 metres high. The archives explained why: two extra storeys, added in 1935 and 1942. We designed a lightweight steel roof and proposed reinforced concrete jacketing for the ground-floor columns.

Milan · Attic conversion · Quando un sottotetto rivela i segreti di un palazzo

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The partition wall that is not load-bearing, but carries load anyway

Structures & Safety

The partition wall that isn't load-bearing, but doesn't know it and carries load anyway

A designer on site, a reputable contractor, all permits in order: yet when a non-load-bearing partition was removed in an early-1900s Milan building, the timber floor above sagged within hours and the wall of the flat upstairs cracked along its whole base. For decades the partition, resting on a stiff steel-beam and hollow-tile floor, had been quietly propping up the timber floor. The article explains the mechanism and what to check before removing any wall in an older building.

Milan · Historic buildings · Il tramezzo che non è portante ma lui non lo sa e porta lo stesso

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Cinema & Engineering

Naples, a heist straight out of a film (but not like Ocean's Thirteen)

On 16 April 2026 a gang robbed the Crédit Agricole branch in the Vomero district of Naples, held 25 hostages and escaped through a hole in the vault floor. They had dug a 12-metre tunnel, 70 to 90 cm high, by hand through Neapolitan yellow tuff, starting from the sewer network; a geologist surveyed it and produced a 3D reconstruction. We look at why tuff allows silent digging, why it is also prone to collapse, and how far reality is from the cinema.

Naples · Tuff · Urban underground · Napoli, il colpo da film (non come quello di Ocean's Thirteen)

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Home & Paperwork

“I only did a bit of work on the flat”

A buyer purchased a flat registered as “under construction”, finished it without a technician and moved some partitions. Registering residence there required a certificate of occupancy (agibilità), and the flat did not qualify: rooms below the minimum natural-light ratio, floor area and ceiling height, and windows below energy-efficiency rules. The article explains how the costs pile up, from building regularisation (sanatoria) to rework and delays, and what a technician should check before any works, ideally before the notarial deed of sale (rogito).

Home & Paperwork · Building permits · “Ho fatto solo qualche lavoro in casa”

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Cinema & Engineering

Ocean's Thirteen and Hollywood's most improbable TBM

In Ocean's Thirteen (2007) the crew bring a Channel Tunnel boring machine (TBM) under Las Vegas to fake an earthquake beneath a casino. Great cinema, an engineering disaster: such machines need exceptional transport and weeks of assembly, digging in secret is impossible, the Channel Tunnel machines were built for soft chalk marl rather than alluvial ground, and scraping foundations cannot mimic a seismic signature. One detail rings true: a buried TBM cannot reverse, as two British machines show.

Cinema & Engineering · Ocean's Thirteen e la TBM più improbabile di Hollywood

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