STRUCTURE Articles

Using the code provisions as intended, without any additional factors of safety, will result in structural designs that inherently meet the stability safety objectives.

It’s time for an update to your concrete specifications.

Robert K. Otani, PE LEED AP, is Chief Technology Officer at Thornton Tomasetti, Inc., a 1,800+ person multidisciplinary engineering and consulting firm, and founded the CORE studio, an applications development, advanced computational modeling, and R&D group at his firm.

The concept of borrowed belief is not new, and is certainly not mine. In fact, a quick Google search brings up other articles and entire websites dedicated to borrowed belief. I first heard the term earlier this year at a […]

To help engineers avoid repetitive tasks and foster creative, more efficient design of plant steel structures, Hyundai Engineering initiated a project to automate structural design processes. They wanted to develop a new physical modeling method and generate an analytical digital […]

How Shuriken played a vital role in the North Post Oak Road Pedestrian Bridge A recent study by Forbes Home ranked Houston as the city with the fourth worst commute in America. With a large workforce and poor accessibility to […]

Last week, I received a message from an early-career structural engineer – let's call her Sarah. Despite graduating near the top of her class and landing a position at a prestigious firm, she was considering leaving the profession. "I just don't feel like I belong here," she wrote. "It's not any one thing – it's a thousand little things."

The concept of "strong column, weak beam" is a fundamental design principle that ensures the stability and resilience of buildings during seismic events. This principle can be applied to how we approach personal and professional development.

Take the time to understand all aspects of a given project and memorialize those elements in the contract.

Besides the structural aspects of a building, geologic effects as well as non-structural hazards need to be addressed in any retrofit.

Combining viscous dampers with advanced structural design technologies can be effective in identifying optimized retrofit solutions.

In some circumstances, such as low eave height and strong winds, snow that originally fell on the ground can contribute to a roof top snow drift.