On April 19th 2021 an online memorial event was held to celebrate the life of Prof Giovanni Solari of the University of Genoa who died five months previously. His career is well described in a memorial article in the Journal of Wind Engineering that can be found here. I was one of over 20 friends and colleagues who spoke at the event. My short contribution is given below.
Giovanni Solari has left us a very considerable legacy, and I would like to briefly consider three aspects of this. The first is his legacy to the wind engineering community. He was the first President of the International Association of Wind Engineering and held that role from 2003 to 2007. But that role involved much more than a ceremonial aspect. He was instrumental in turning the IAWE from a very loose association that met for an extended supper every four years at the major conferences to a legally organised society with a properly formulated constitution, member organisations and a functioning secretariat. This involved much work with lawyers (an unenviable task) and much travelling and discussion. In a real way the existence of an international wind engineering community is one of Giovanni’s major legacies.
The second aspect I want to mention is his intellectual legacy. Giovanni had the gift of being able to take a complex physical or engineering problem, often in the field of structural dynamics, and to express this problem mathematically in such a way that he could obtain closed form solutions for the engineering parameters of interest. These were often complex but allowed a proper appreciation of the role of different material and loading properties to be understood and generalised. Giovanni was the master of the closed form solution. In these days, when it is so easy simply to throw computer power at a difficult problem through complex CFD of FE analysis, the need for such closed form solution becomes all the greater to inform calculations and to actually understand the issues in depth. Giovanni’s intellectual legacy, of doing the hard thinking and analysis before resorting to numerical calculation, is a very important one to keep hold of.
The third of the legacies I want to mention is a personal one. I believe I first met Giovanni at the first European Conference on Wind Engineering in the early 1990s. Certainly we began to correspond after that (and remember those were the days before the instant gratification of emails) and I paid a memorable visit to Genoa around that time where the highlight for me was the ability to spend some hours in the library, which was much better resourced in wind engineering terms than that of my own institution. I was received with courtesy and kindness and Giovanni spent time showing me around the city that he clearly loved. Over the years that same courtesy and kindness has been shown by Giovanni to numerous people – from research students at the very start of their careers to the more senior of us. And that is how many of us, myself included, who remember him – for his personal legacy as much as for his undoubted scholarship, organisational and intellectual legacies, as the kindest and most courteous of friends and colleagues. He will be very much missed by many in the community.
Giovanni – Requiescat in pace
Engineering, history and ecclesiology 