Chronology of erection of the earliest reinforced concrete shells

The subject of the review paper associates with today's renewed interest in thin shells. The wide-spread building of thin reinforced concrete shells ended abruptly at the end of the 1960s. Contemporary progress in numerical methods of analysis gives an opportunity to calculate the shells of non-canonical forms. It allows the engineer to closely approach the actual behavior of thin concrete shells by performing geometrically and physically nonlinear analyses. But well-educated engineer and architect must know the history of thin shells for better analyzing, designing, and constructing of them at present time. The paper presents well-known examples on early reinforced concrete shells and gives materials not containing in other publications. The paper contains 31 figures.