The focus of the 2025 Fall Conference of the Swiss Geotechnical Society was on understanding, analysing and learning from damage cases that impressively demonstrate the limits – and opportunities – of geotechnical practice.
It was a day of open exchange and critical reflection. Engineers, geologists, planners and researchers from Switzerland and abroad discussed accidents, landslides, subsidence, structural failures and their causes – not with a finger-pointing attitude, but with the aim of deepening knowledge and making future risks more manageable.
What made this conference particularly noteworthy was its courage to be transparent: mistakes were not concealed but understood as valuable sources of insight. The case studies presented – many of them with detailed geotechnical data and impressive visualisations – showed how crucial communication, interdisciplinary cooperation and careful risk assessment are in our field.
Geotechnical engineering is not an exact science – it thrives on dealing with uncertainties. This conference has once again shown how important it is to take the unpredictable seriously and to learn as much as possible from every incident.
A big thank you to all the speakers: Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Christian Moormann, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Frank Rackwitz, Prof. Dr. Ozer Cinicioglu, Dr.-Ing. Karsten Beckhaus, Prof. Dr. Brice Lecampion & Regina Fakhretdinova, Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Theodoros Triantafyllidis, Dr. Walter Steiner & Jürg Ryser, Alessandro Minotto, Jürgen Gesemann & Valentin Raemy, Dr. Nathaniel Walter.
