Key People
Giorgio Pietrangeli
Head of the family since 1964
Founder of his own professional consultancy firm, Studio Pietrangeli, at the age of 30, Giorgio Pietrangeli’s passion for dam design grew during his time at university and in his father’s engineering firm.
Pupil of Professor Filippo Arredi, luminary of dam design in the Hydraulic Department of the University of Rome, he graduated in 1960 with a thesis on arch gravity dams (known in SP as “Project Zero”).
Mr. Pietrangeli has been always personally responsible for the technical direction and overall management of all the dam design services provided, from the start of his career up to the present day, with the same enthusiasm. He has invented revolutionary and extremely economic design solutions, including development of the firm’s fast-track methodology successfully adopted in several outstanding projects completed or currently under construction.
All his working life has been dedicated to dam design, forming his independent, family-run, “boutique” company and creating a personal design method (the so-called “SP Method”), based on the fundamental principles of Descartes and Hobbes. His method remains unchanged even today and is conveyed to and adopted by the 80 or so professionals now working for the firm.
Mr. Pietrangeli’s strong passion and enthusiasm for life in general and dam design in particular is contagious and his collaborators cannot but be infected. He fervently sustains that “Imagination is more important than knowledge” (cit. Albert Einstein) and that the definition of an engineer is one who uses his/her “ingenuity”.
He has shown that with love, competence, courage and perseverance it is possible to solve any issue and overcome any challenge especially in the field of dam design. As an ambitious young engineer, his steadfast belief in himself and his convictions led him to promise the Emperor of Ethiopia that, under penalty of death, he would finish the design and supervise the construction of the Legadadi dam within the agreed record time (thereby ensuring a safe water supply for the drought-stricken city of Addis Ababa) … and he succeeded!
Giorgio Pietrangeli’s unique and extraordinary experience in the field of hydropower and dam design, spanning almost 60 years, is internationally recognized and includes nowadays: