Giovanni Rodio

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Giovanni Rodio (born January 24, 1888 in Brindisi ; † October 10, 1957 ) was an Italian civil engineer for geotechnical engineering and entrepreneur.

Rodio came to Zurich with his parents when he was ten and grew up there. He studied civil engineering at the ETH Zurich with his degree in 1910. He then worked for a few years as an engineer for hydropower plants, first at the Brusio power plants, and from 1911 for the Locher company building a hydropower plant in Spain. From 1914 he worked for Professor G. Narutowicz at power plants in Spain and Portugal. In the First World War he was a pioneer officer on the Italian side from 1916.

In 1921 he founded his construction company in Milan, which initially struggled with difficulties. In 1923 they were involved in the construction of the Rochemolles dam near Bardonecchia . In the same year there was a disaster when the Gleno dam ruptured with around 600 deaths. That impressed Rodio deeply and he decided to devote himself to the foundation. At that time, the basics of soil mechanics were only just being established and Rodio made contact with the leading soil mechanic Karl Terzaghi early on (1931) . He consulted during the work on the foundation of the Bou Hanifia dam in Algeria from mid-August to early September 1931. He also had contacts with the Swiss geologist Maurice Lugeon . He became known for pioneering work in soil and rock injection (cement injections into the ground or rock, for example when founding dams). The Rodio procedure was used worldwide. Rodio himself used it in 1927/28 at the Seeuferegg and Gelmersperre in Switzerland and especially from 1929 in North Africa (Bakhadda, Cherfas, Bou Hanifia). France followed in 1931 (Verdon, Chambon, Sautet dams). In 1935 he moved to Switzerland, where he lived in St. Moritz. In 1948 he employed the trained gardener Fanny du Bois-Reymond to look after his alpine garden there . After the war he expanded his activities abroad to South America, the Congo, India, Pakistan, Germany, Austria and Norway. Shortly before his death in 1957, he was working on the sealing of dams in Canada and was planning a project in the USA. He could no longer carry out his plan to gain a foothold there himself.

He also made rodio piles and a diaphragm wall method. Christian Veder , who developed a diaphragm wall method at ICOS, was with Rodio in the 1930s, where he experimented with bentonite suspensions.

In 1937 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Lausanne.

literature

  • CE Blatter, obituary in Schweizerische Bauzeitung, November 30, 1957, pp. 763–764, pdf

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Christiane Ludwig Körner : Rediscovered. Psychoanalysts in Berlin , Psychosozial-Verlag, Berlin 2014, p. 61.


personal data
SURNAME Rodio, Giovanni
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian geotechnician
DATE OF BIRTH January 24, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Brindisi
DATE OF DEATH October 10, 1957