James R. (Jim) Harris received his undergraduate education in civil engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1968. After working in consulting in Denver for five years, he earned his MSCE and Ph. D. from the University of Illinois, Urbana in 1975 and 1980, respectively. From 1975-1981 he was a research structural engineer at the National Bureau of Standards after which he returned to professional practice. He established J.R. Harris & Company in 1984.
Jim is an active member of several committees that produce national standards for structural engineering practice and is a former chair of the committee that produces ASCE/SEI 7 Minimum Design Loads for Buildings and Other Structures, and its subcommittee for seismic design. He has also served on ACI Committee 318 which prepares Building Code Requirements for Structural Concrete and on the AISC Committees that prepare the Specification for Structural Steel Buildings and the Seismic Provisions for Structural Steel Buildings. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to the development, improvement, and implementation of modern standards for the design of buildings.
How did you become so involved in the development of codes and standards?
What really got me deeply into codes and standards work was graduate school. The professor to whom I was assigned as a research assistant was very interested in standards. Less than a year after I showed up there, he left the university and took a position as the director for the Center for Building Technology at what was then the National Bureau of Standards (NBS). He sent NBS money to the University of Illinois to keep me working on his pet project and then hired me once I got through the course work and the preliminary examinations to come and do a dissertation while working on staff at NBS.
That’s where I started working on various committees. The predecessor of ASCE 7 was a standard known as ANSI A58.1. While I was working at NBS I was put on the seismic subcommittee for that standard; so, I’ve been working on what is now ASCE 7 since 1979. The work I was doing at NBS was closely related to improving codes for seismic design which meant that I was involved in committees that later became the Building Seismic Safety Council; I’ve been on those committees ever since.
Of all the initiatives that you’ve been involved in, what’s been your favorite or most rewarding?
One of my favorites is an R&D project that we did for a local company to develop a new seismic force-resisting system (SFRS) and then get it officially qualified by the ICC Evaluation Service (ICC-ES). It was the first such approval of an SFRS, and I was fortunate to be in a unique position to accomplish it.
I was involved in an applied research project at the Applied Technology Council in the mid-2000s that developed what’s now known as FEMA P-695, which is a methodology for validating that an SFRS designed using linear procedures with R factors, overstrength factors, and deflection amplification factors, would actually deliver the kind of performance that we expected. The pass-fail criterion developed for that methodology was eventually adopted by ASCE 7. FEMA sponsored that project because they wanted to stimulate innovation: the idea was, “How do we know that some new system is going to perform the way we expect?”
I made a presentation to the committee that runs ICC-ES in 2008 as we were wrapping up the work on that project, describing what this procedure was and how it could really help them. It was politely received and promptly ignored.
Nine years later, a company in Denver asked what it would take to get their proprietary structural system to work in earthquake country: they wanted to go to California with their system. I described the P-695 process to them and told them that we should go see if ICC-ES would be interested. This time the people at ICC-ES were interested (some personnel had changed, and the context was different).
Beyond modifying the proprietary system so its performance would be what is needed, we also had to develop acceptance criteria for ICC-ES that implemented the P-695 methodology and made it mandatory. That was a big step. Besides achieving a qualification for our client’s system, we set the stage so that other systems could be qualified by ICC-ES.
What do you think is the biggest misconception engineers have about the development of codes and standards?
I think something that practicing engineers probably don’t realize is how serious the competition between various material trade associations is in terms of protecting their stake in the market. And sometimes protecting their stake in the market means driving a stake through the heart of a competitor.
Early in the development of what is now the basis for our seismic provisions, at the then new Building Seismic and Safety Council, we were in the process of taking a set of tentative new seismic building provisions that had been published in the late 1970s as a direct result of the 1971 San Fernando Earthquake and creating recommended seismic provisions. That earthquake destroyed several buildings that were compliant with the then most current model building codes for seismic. It was the opinion of a lot of people shortly after that earthquake that, if we had code provisions that were up with the state of knowledge in the research world, some of these interesting failures would not have occurred. I had the good fortune to be in a position at NBS where I was put in charge of comparing those provisions with the existing standards at the time.
I carried that with me as volunteer work after I left NBS. That effort came up with the impacts on the costs of construction and engineering design, as well as tweaks that needed to be made to the tentative provisions to get them ready for prime time. One of the key tweaks made changed the R factor for special reinforced concrete moment frames to be the same as the R factor for steel special moment frames. In the tentative provisions, the R factor was eight for steel moment frames and seven for concrete moment frames. The Portland Cement Association thought that wasn’t fair. I was impressed by the politicking and the vote counting that went on. There’s a lot of that, and I don’t think practicing engineers know how much of that goes on behind the scenes.
How much does looking at failures influences codes? You were involved in some of the 9/11 investigations and are currently investigating the Surfside collapse.
A lot. One of the lessons learned from the Pentagon actually made a difference in ACI 318. We bumped up the capacity reduction factor for spirally reinforced columns with respect to tied columns because of some of the things we saw in the performance of the Pentagon, which was a rather normal 1930s era big government building.
In those days people used spirally reinforced columns because they cost less for heavy loads. That’s because the code permitted a 25% bump in capacity for a spirally reinforced column, as opposed to a tied column. That was enough to more than overcome the increased cost of the fabrication and installation of spiral reinforcement compared to ties. ACI basically took spirally reinforced columns out of business in the building code before I got on that committee: at some point when strength design was adopted, the two types of columns were treated almost the same. There was a small difference giving a slight benefit to spiral reinforcement, and it wasn’t enough to encourage the use of spirally reinforced columns.
What happened at the Pentagon showed that for unpredictable lateral loads, the column with spiral reinforcement is immensely better than the tied column. And so, we did something in the code that encourages the better column.
Do you think the Surfside collapse will lead to changes in the code or have most of the issues been resolved in the evolution of the codes since 1979?
Some of both. You know there’s been a lot of changes since 1979 in the way buildings are designed, but I expect we’ll see some recommended changes to the concrete building code coming out of this. I wouldn’t be surprised if we make recommendations about condition assessment of older buildings and how you go about doing that.
What have you learned from going around the world to different places and seeing how they’re doing things compared to how we’re doing things? Are we leading the way or are we behind?
If you interact with Europeans who are very much up on structural reliability, their opinion is that the methods in the Eurocodes are much more academically correct and that the US is behind the times. My opinion is: “No, actually we’re not.” If you delve deeply into what we have in our system here, I think we’re taking a more correct approach on implementing risk adjustments to our reliability than they are in the Eurocode.
A friend who was an academic from South Africa did a comparative study looking at what we were doing in the US and in Canada versus what was in the Eurocodes and he decided that we are getting the same answers, but are getting there a lot quicker and easier than the Eurocode, which is very complicated. We have a method that, generally speaking, our practitioners are using and that comes up with reasonably good reliability-based designs. The method in the Eurocodes is more complicated. It looks like it’s more rigorous in terms of applications of reliability, but it actually doesn’t tie the knots together on some of the risk adjustments you need to make for different modes of failure, which we do in the material design codes in the US, not in the structural loads codes.
What do you think is the biggest opportunity moving forward in this industry or something exciting and new that you’re looking forward to?
There are a lot of things where we are doing much better engineering today, because of the way we use computers. Many things that were intractable problems 50 years ago are now treated rationally. Today we can analytically examine structural performance under a lot of different scenarios that would have been difficult before. I think it leads to safer and more serviceable buildings, and, in many instances, more economical buildings. So, I think the future is bright.
And that comes with a threat: that people will think that structural engineering can become so routine that you can basically put an architectural plan into a computer program and have your structural engineering pop out. And you know, there are some circumstances where you can do that for some aspects of the design. But in terms of how the system as a whole is going to work, you can’t. We’re not there and I don’t expect to actually ever see that.■