STRUCTURE Articles

Three 75-foot curved timber beams distinguish one of the newest exhibits at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo.

Maintaining the structural integrity of historic American barrel-aging warehouses requires care, creativity, knowledge, and experience.

An outside-the-box design demonstrates that mass timber, in this case mass plywood, provides an aesthetically pleasing, cost effective, carbon sequestering, and thermally efficient alternative for warehouses and other big box buildings.

How timber, steel, and concrete built a world-class engineering institute and advanced Princeton University’s campus sustainability goals.

A recently updated guide helps structural engineers navigate the design process and roles and responsibilities when it comes to premanufactured metal plate connected wood trusses.

Reuse of screws is already occurring in the field. The critical question is not whether reuse happens, but whether it can be made measurably safe.

Alternate procedures may be called for when the vertical elements of a lateral force resisting system are not continuous to the highest diaphragm.

Today’s employees are managing stress from more than one direction. In addition to deadlines, client demands, and the pressures of professional life, many are also balancing personal responsibilities such as family, finances, and health concerns. For principals and firm leaders, […]

The next meaningful advancements in structural analysis will come not from new solvers, but from cloud-native, integrated workflow architectures that embed automation, traceability, and collaboration as first-class capabilities.

My local structural engineering community has been invaluable in helping continue this conversation. Our local NCSEA SE3 committee has participated in several mental health presentations and panel discussions, both locally and nationally, often alongside mental health professionals (because, honestly, I’m no expert). Through this work, we even developed a workshop for our structural engineering association aimed at opening discussions with firm leaders and HR professionals about how to build and sustain a mentally healthy workplace.

There is never a boring day for a consulting structural engineer; a typical day brings a new challenge and often one that needs some research or some collaboration with others. When new issues are particular to one project, which the engineer did not face before, there is much to learn, and often technical issues are the easiest ones to address (because the engineer has the proper education and experience to tackle it).

In this inaugural article of a three-part series, the author explores the first step in deciding whether to start your own structural engineering business.