255 October 2026

The 2026 Turriano-ICOHTEC Prize for young historians, organised by ICOHTEC and sponsored by Fundación Juanelo Turriano, was awarded jointly to two authors, Yohann Guffroy for his book Les traits de l’invention. Production et usages du dessin d’objet technique en Angleterre au tournant du xixe siècle and  David Singerman for his book How Capitalism Reinvented Sugar.

Laudatio

We are beginning a new audiovisual series showcasing historic machines, using 3D animation videos based on the mechanisms described in Los veintiún libros de los ingenios y máquinas [The twenty-one books of engineering and machines], a manuscript kept in the National Library (Mss. 3372-3376).

The first video features a recreation of Ctesibius’s pump, a hydraulic machine designed to raise water to great heights. It visually explores how the machine works and the mechanical principles on which it is based.

This is the first in a series of videos that we will be posting on our website, where web users can discover new machines and mechanisms described in the manuscript.

Discover the first video in the series and stay tuned for new posts.

See the video on our YouTube channel

The science outreach programme La Fábrica de la Ciencia has devoted a space to the Wadi al-Garawi Dam Project, a multidisciplinary endeavour in the eastern Egyptian desert whose co-sponsoring institutions include Fundación Juanelo Turriano.

The project’s mission is to study a unique work of hydraulic engineering, the Sadd el-Kafara dam, and its surrounding landscape to gain an understanding of the dynamics of water management and water culture in ancient Egypt.

View video

The Bulletin of Earthquake Engineering has published the article Experimental and numerical analysis of out-of-plane behaviour of historical dry-joint stone walls: insights from a scaled laboratory wall model of the Coricancha temple, Peru.

The study analyses the seismic behaviour of the historic Inca stone walls of the Coricancha temple in Peru through experimental tests and numerical models. Among the authors is José María Goicolea, Director of our Foundation.

Read the article abstract

The full article is available in our Foundation’s library.

Fundación Juanelo Turriano director José María Goicolea received the EASD Special Award for Outstanding and Sustained Contribution to Structural Dynamics in Hannover from the European Association for Structural Dynamics (EASD) during EURODYN 2026.

The award acknowledges the recipient’s outstanding and sustained contribution to structural dynamics and recognises his decades-long career devoted to research, teaching and the application of structural engineering, particularly in the European standards (Eurocodes) area.

José María Goicolea is chaired professor emeritus at the Technical University of Madrid’s School of Civil Engineering. He has a lengthy career as a researcher in structural dynamics and computational mechanics and has made major contributions in fields such as railway bridge dynamics and advanced methods of structural analysis.

We at the Foundation would like to offer him our most heartfelt congratulations for this important international accolade.

The Twelfth National Symposium on Geotechnical Engineering (SNIG), addressing the theme Geotechnical Challenges of the 21st Century, was held in Santander from 22 to 25 September.

As part of the event, Claudio Olalla Marañón, Foundation Vice-President and Chaired Professor Emeritus of the Technical University of Madrid, delivered the lecture Geotechnics of Embankment Dams.

The lecture was the Sixth Jiménez Salas Lecture, a series that does homage to the memory of a man regarded as one of the founders of modern Spanish geotechnics.

The deadline for submitting entries for the 2026-2027 Engineering Communication and Dissemination Prizes is 31 January 2027. The prizes are conferred by the Engineering Institute and Fundación para el Fomento de la Innovación Industrial (F2i2).

Rules and candidate applications