This thesis is focused to the ideal concept, design, implementation and em-placement of a sculpture in the respective area, designed in a deeper context of the work itself to its surroundings, its history and specific local character. To solve the emplacement of the sculpture, a scenic park surrounding the Castle at Štěkeň (South-West Bohemia) has been chosen. The design respects fully not only scenic dominants, but also neighboring architecture and vistas directly in the respective locality. A full appeal of the art work is enabled by applying convenient material re-specting its milieu and the sculpture theme itself as well. Also the onlooker´s position toward the sculpture proportions and its comprehensibility and readability has been taken in consideration. The theme and concept of the sculpture is closely connected to the Christian Or-der ?Congregatio Jesu? settled directly in the facilities of the Štěkeň Castle and related first of all to Mary Ward, its founder and to her first community of ?English Virgins? as well. A component part of this thesis is formed by a secondary pedagogic project ? a workhop meeting for children, convened in autumn 2010 directly to the Štěkeň Castle premises. It dealt with the human being´s relation to the landscape. This thesis focused to the relation between an art work and the surrounding sce-nery is concerned also to spiritual creativity from the point of view of actual cultural-social neediness respecting also the application and readability of Christian symbolism in respect to actual cultural experience.

<p align="justify">In a context of restoration of historical masonry structures, it is crucial to properly estimate the residual strength and the potential structural failure modes in order to assess the safety of buildings. Due to its mesostructure and the quasi-brittle nature of its constituents, masonry presents preferential damage orientations, strongly localised failure modes and damage-induced anisotropy, which are complex to incorporate in structural computations. Furthermore, masonry structures are generally subjected to complex loading processes including both in-plane and out-of-plane loads which considerably influence the potential failure mechanisms. As a consequence, both the membrane and the flexural behaviours of masonry walls have to be taken into account for a proper estimation of the structural stability.</p><p><p align="justify">Macrosopic models used in structural computations are based on phenomenological laws including a set of parameters which characterises the average behaviour of the material. These parameters need to be identified through experimental tests, which can become costly due to the complexity of the behaviour particularly when cracks appear. The existing macroscopic models are consequently restricted to particular assumptions. Other models based on a detailed mesoscopic description are used to estimate the strength of masonry and its behaviour with failure. This is motivated by the fact that the behaviour of each constituent is a priori easier to identify than the global structural response. These mesoscopic models can however rapidly become unaffordable in terms of computational cost for the case of large-scale three-dimensional structures.</p><p><p align="justify">In order to keep the accuracy of the mesoscopic modelling with a more affordable computational effort for large-scale structures, a multi-scale framework using computational homogenisation is developed to extract the macroscopic constitutive material response from computations performed on a sample of the mesostructure, thereby allowing to bridge the gap between macroscopic and mesoscopic representations. Coarse graining methodologies for the failure of quasi-brittle heterogeneous materials have started to emerge for in-plane problems but remain largely unexplored for shell descriptions. The purpose of this study is to propose a new periodic homogenisation-based multi-scale approach for quasi-brittle thin shell failure.</p><p><p align="justify">For the numerical treatment of damage localisation at the structural scale, an embedded strong discontinuity approach is used to represent the collective behaviour of fine-scale cracks using average cohesive zones including mixed cracking modes and presenting evolving orientation related to fine-scale damage evolutions.</p><p><p align="justify">A first originality of this research work is the definition and analysis of a criterion based on the homogenisation of a fine-scale modelling to detect localisation in a shell description and determine its evolving orientation. Secondly, an enhanced continuous-discontinuous scale transition incorporating strong embedded discontinuities driven by the damaging mesostructure is proposed for the case of in-plane loaded structures. Finally, this continuous-discontinuous homogenisation scheme is extended to a shell description in order to model the localised behaviour of out-of-plane loaded structures. These multi-scale approaches for failure are applied on typical masonry wall tests and verified against three-dimensional full fine-scale computations in which all the bricks and the joints are discretised.</p> / Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieur / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished