Verulam

Tony Cusens will succeed David Lazenby as President of the Institution 1991-92 at an Ordinary Meeting at Institution headquarters on 3 October 1991. The handover ceremony begins at 6pm when Professor Cusens will give his Presidential Address, ‘Concrete steps to construction’s future’, the full text of which will be published in The Structural Engineer in November.

Professor J. Wilton-Ely It is appropriate that Dr. Mainstone ended his presentation with a slide of a model (the model of the church that Justinian is shown offering to the Virgin in the mosaic over the south entrance to the narthex). I have done a good deal of research on the history of architectural models. It would be interesting to know more about how documented models were used in antiquity and in the early Middle Ages. Although there appears to be no documentation in the case of Hagia Sophia, they must surely have been using structural models to calculate some of the problems involved in the way that Brunelleschi had to cope with unprecedented spans by the use of models in the design of his Florentine dome.