User:Deckelleher/sandbox/Alfred Stucky

Alfred Stucky

Alfred Stucky, was born on March 16th, 1892 in La Chaux-de-Fonds and died on September 6, 1969 in Lausanne, Switzerland. He was a Swiss civil engineer and dam designer. In 1926, he founded the engineering consultancy that still bears his name today, Stucky Ltd. This consultancy is internationally renowned as a specialist in hydropower and dam engineering. In 2013 Stucky SA joined the Gruner group, where Alfred Stucky worked almost a century earlier, from 1917 to 1923. Stucky Ltd is headquartered in Renens, Switzerland.

From primary school, Alfred Stucky was attracted to the technical field; he therefore enrolled in an engineering course at the ETH Zurich. During his civil engineering studies, the hydraulic specialty attracted him. Later, he would become interested in examining the feasibility of hydraulic projects; he's quoted as saying "the engineer is.....a man of action".

He gained practical work experiences apprenticing at the Meyer design office in Spiez for the construction of the Zweisimmen-Lenk railway line as well as for river corrections, Following Meyer he also gained experience at Favetto, Bosshard, Steiner & Co., a company which hired him for the construction from the Brienz Lake railway, for five weeks in Dortmund. Later, his marriage to Nelly Mathis, the daughter of an architect, will bring him closer to another field of the builder's craft.

Recruited by Gruner in Basel in 1917, he perfected the calculation methods and introduced the concept of elastic deformation of an arch dam for the construction of the Montsalvens dam. He also proposed to optimize the form of the arch dam, no longer in the form of a circular arc, but a parabolic arc as an optimal shape. However, at the beginning of the 20th century the theoretical bases for calculating parabolic dams were not available. He solves this problem by dividing the dam which he then studies into 4 horizontal arcs and 9 vertical sectors applying the subsequent calculations to each element. During the construction of this dam, he met the director of the Lausanne School of Engineering (École d'ingénieurs de Lausanne), Jean Landry, who offered him a post as lecturer in 1927. In 1938 He was appointed as an ordinary professor, where he declared, during his inaugural lecture, the engineer is above all a director, a man of action. He made a clear distinction between design and calculation, regularly citing the following adage: "A poorly designed dam remains a poorly designed dam, even if it is well calculated; a well-designed dam remains a well-designed dam, even if it is miscalculated. "

During his career, he participated in the construction of 38 dams from 1915 to his death in 1969, including 20 in Switzerland. In this context, it contributes 22 preliminary projects, 29 detailed studies, 26 construction projects and works supervision, and 12 expert assesments. His projects in Switzerland included Dixence and Grande-Dixence (still the tallest concrete gravity dam in the World), Mauvoisin in 1951 and Moiry in 1958, Luzzone in 1963, His projects abroad include the Latiyan buttress dam in Iran, the Beni-Bahdel dam in Algeria and the Beni M'Tir dam in Tunisia, he also worked on projects in Romania, Greece and Morocco.

Most of Alfred Stucky's publications deal with problems with arch dams. His doctoral thesis deals with arch dams; his first book will be followed by some forty more publications, including a reference book for specialists in concrete dams published in 1957 with Maurice-H. Derron. In 1961 with his son Jean-Pierre Stucky and E. Schnitzler, he published an article that summarizes his work on the Swiss dams Châtelot, Mauvoisin, Moiry, Malvaglia, Nalps, Luzzone, Limmern and Turtmann.

In 1928, Alfred Stucky founded the Hydraulic Constructions Laboratory, and in 1935 the geotechnical laboratory of the Lausanne School of Engineering, at what was then the Polytechnic School of the University of Lausanne (EPUL). When Jean Landry died in 1940, Alfred Stucky succeeded him as the head of EPUL which would a few years later, under Stucky, become the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, (or EPFL) now ranked as one of the best universities in the world. In 1943 he presided over the new school of architecture of the canton of Vaud. A terrace in Lausanne was named after Alfred Stucky in August 2008.

Maurice COSANDEY wrote a biography of Alfred Stucky entitled "Alfred Stucky (1892-1969) Un grand ingénieur et un réalisateur authentique" (....A great engineer and a authentic builder) it was published by the EPFL in 1992.