Franco Levi

Levi received his degree in Engineering from the Ecole Centrale in Paris and from the Polytechnic University of Turin in the years 1936 and 1937.

After the war, since 1945 to 1961, as Director of the CNR Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Italian National Research Council) in Turin, Franco Levi had an essential role in the international discussion on the theoretical and practical aspects of this innovative technique and on the establishment of design rules to be internationally agreed.

The innovation of prestressed concrete, together with the new approaches of plastic design and of probabilistic safety criteria induced the most advanced specialists of structural design and analysis to install in 1953 a new committee (Comité Européen du Béton – CEB) having the objective of a coordination and synthesis of research and of the creation and international harmonization of the principles and rules for the conception, calculation, construction, and maintenance of concrete structures according to the new approaches.

Between 1966 and 1970 he was also President of the ”Fédération Internationale de la Précontrainte – FIP”, which had the role of promoting the innovative technique in the practical field.

Franco Levi had an essential role in the coordination of the drafting of such 5 Eurocodes based on the same criteria of the “Limit States” and on what was called the “Semiprobabilistic approach”.