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LEO CASAGRANDE
1 903-1 990
BY ANTON TEDESKO AND RALPH B. PECK
THEO AIDE, a person of great warmth and personal
charm, was an experienced civil engineer with a solid theoretical
foundation; he excelled in what is now known as geotechnical
engineering. He combined high technical ability with good
judgment and, in proper balance, scientific rigor with an aware-
ness of the needs of practical engineering and construction.
Leo was born September 17, 1903, in Haidenschaft, near
Trieste, a cultural center in the German-speaking part of the old
Austrian empire, which was torn apart by World War I. He died
at Winchester, Massachusetts, on October 25, 1990, after many
years as a consultant and a professor at Harvard University.
His father, Angelus Casagrande, served as a cavalry officer in
the Austrian army during the war en cl was taken prisoner in
Russia, which repatriated prisoners only years after hostilities
had ended. He returned from Russia in 1922 but died shortly
thereafter. In his father's absence, Leo; his mother, Anna; elder
brother, Arthur; and younger sister, Alix, moved from their
home to remain in Austria because the province in which they
lived had become a part of Italy.
Leo attencled high school in Austria, ant! in 1918 the Casa-
grancles moved to Vienna and five cl for a while with the family of
Leo's uncle. Later, they rented a modest apartment there, a
couple of miles from the center of town.
41
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
Leo, as well as his brother, Arthur, twelve months his senior,
were students at the Institute of Technology in Vienna, where
they had outstanding teachers, Friedrich Hartmann (bridges)
and Rudolf Saliger (reinforced concrete) among them. They
attended five and a half years of engineering courses, their
educations being nearly identical.
Vienna during these postwar years attracted outstanding,
stimulating people in the fields of sciences, arts, music, litera-
ture, and drama. It had become a center of great cultural and
intellectual activity. The young Casagrandes were exposed to,
and influenced by, the cultural climate that contributed to their
well-rounded education. Old-world manners and courtesy came
naturally to Leo (and he knew how to dance a Viennese waltz).
Men like Leo who lived in Vienna during that period felt a
continuing nostalgia for those Vienna days; he grew up as an
Austrian, not as a German.
, ~
While Arthur went to the United States soon after his gradua-
tion and became an assistant to Professor Karl Terzaghi (the
founder of soil mechanics) at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), Leo started his career as a structural engi-
neer in Augsburg, Bavaria. After two and a halfyears, in 1930, he
too decided to go to the United States, where he became a
research assistant at MIT.
In 1931 Terzaghi accepted the offer of the Institute of Tech-
nology in Vienna to become its first professor in the new field of
soil mechanics, and Leo returned to Vienna in 1932 to become
his assistant at the Institute. Part of a small seminal group
surrounding Terzaghi in those early years, Leo acquired a great
deal of new knowledge and received an engineering doctorate.
In 1933 he accepted a teaching assignment at the Technolog-
ical University of Berlin, where he took charge of organizing a
soil mechanics institute.
In 1934 he was asked to head the Soil Mechanics Division of
the Office of the Inspector General for the German Highways,
which had the principal assignment of building the German
Autobahn, the first true superhighway system. For more than ten
years he had most challenging assignments, solving many prob-
lems in foundation and earthworks engineering and in soil
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LEO CASAGRANDE
43
stabilization. He developed the principles and practice of elec-
tro-osmotic dewatering and stabilization of soils and used it
extensively. He rapidly became recognized as one of the most
knowledgeable soil mechanics engineers in Europe, experi-
enced in research and in common sense practical applications.
While acting as a guide and interpreter for a British delega-
tion of Members of Parliament on an excursion-inspection of
Autobahn bridges, Leo met the attractive Carla Maria Busch, a
free-lance photographer assigned to document the visit. He and
CarIa Maria were married in 1937.
In 1940 and for several years thereafter he was a lecturer in soil
mechanics at the Institute of Technology in Braunschweig,
which gave him the title of professor. He lived and worked in
Berlin during the devastating war. Carla Maria, their three sons,
and one daughter stayed with him for most of that time, but
during the lastyear Carla and the children rived with her mother
in the north.
Immediately after the end of World War II, Allied teams of
engineers and scientists went to Europe to seek out and examine
recent innovations used in Germany and to search for outstand-
ing men who could be induced to work in the United States or
Great Britain, which offered them attractive opportunities in
their field. Among outstanding men thus recruited were Wern-
her von Braun and Wilhelm Flugge. The Russians were engaged
in a similar quest. Leo and his family fortunately left Berlin just
before the Russians arrived; the British reached him first. He was
invited by the British government to join the Building Research
Station at Watford. He worked there from 1946 to 1950 and was
joined there by his family in 1947. His fourth son was born in
England.
In his employment as head of the Soil Mechanics Division of
the German highway system, Leo pioneered in several aspects of
soil mechanics in addition to electro-osmosis. He also wrote
technical papers on such diverse subjects as soil sampling,
removal of peat by blasting as a means of stabilization, the
significance of drainage, and settlement of bridges and other
structures. His application of electro-osmosis to stabilize excava-
tion slopes in extra-sensitive clays in Norway was a remarkable
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MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
success. This achievement came to the attention of the British
and most likely led to his assignment to the Building Research
Station, then the leading organization developing the still rela-
tively new field of soil mechanics in the United Kingdom. The
station's initial interestwas in Leo's expertise in electro-osmosis,
about which very little was known outside Germany. Conse-
quently, his first assignments were to summarize the relevant
principles and practical applications. His report, TheApplication
of ElectrmOsmosis to Practical Problems inFoundations and Earthworks
published by the station in 1947, was widely circulated and
quickly brought recognition to both Leo and the subject among
geotechnical engineers throughout the English-speaking world.
Leo's brother Arthur, in the meantime, had built the soil
mechanics program in the graduate school at Harvard into a
preeminent position in the United States. He succeeded in
bringing Leo and his family to the United States in 1950 and
added him to Harvard's illustrious group. In 1956 Leo became
professor of the practice of soil mechanics and foundation
engineering. In adclition to performing his academic duties, he
became increasingly active as a consultant, in later years practic-
ing with Arthur and his son, Dirk, as Casagrande Consultants in
Arlington, Massachusetts. He was elected to membership in the
National Academy of Engineering in 1974.
His consulting activities included a wide variety of major
projects: foundations for conventional and nuclear power plants
and for commercial and industrial buildings, dams for hy(lro-
electric developments, tailings clams, and numerous sIope-stabi-
lization assignments. Electro-osmosis continued to be signifi-
cant in his practice, including investigations regarding its
suitability for such diverse applications as stabilization of the
collapsed weathered! volcanic soil in the Wilson Tunnel in
Honolulu, stabilization of the sensitive soils of the Turnagain
slide area after the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake in Anchorage,
and an eminently practical scheme for arresting the tilt of the
Leaning Tower of Pisa.
His students found him to be a superb teacher, at once
scientific and practical, who required thoughtful solutions en-
compassing the broad as well as the specialized picture.
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LEO CASAGRANDE
45
He devoted most of his time to his work, but he also took great
pleasure in his family. Having lost the guidance of his father at
an early age and all his material possessions in World War II, he
highly valued personal relationships and was unusually close to
his wife and children. To the extent possible, he shared with
them the development of a farm in New Hampshire, which he
and the family enhanced by planting thousands of pine seecl-
lings and painstakingly pruning them as they grew. He also
characteristically used his expertise to create successfully a pond
on the property, even though local agricultural advisers were of
the opinion it would not hold water.
He was a gentle, kind man with a deep, somewhat wry sense of
humor, a gentleman of the old school, whose contributions to
engineering were notable but were unsung except by others.
Representative terms from entire chapter:
mechanics division
