Past Projects

Every project has a story to tell, some niche that it created all for itself.  This page is an attempt to tell those stories for a handful of either prototypical or especially interesting jobs.  Read on for a little glimpse of how structural engineers view the world you live in...

This ground-up project was featured in Dwell Magazine -- go here for the whole story - (I worked at Kevin Donahue Structural Engineers at the time, so they mentioned his name in the article).

The basic design was conventional construction with several significant tweaks to make it more sustainable.  First off, the roofs were run at severe angles to make passive solar retention efficient.  Additionally, there was radiant heating in the concrete floors.  Finally, we used straw bales along two sides of the building to take the seismic load.

The picture at the left shows how little wood framing is required when straw bale/plaster is used as infill.  The engineering challenge was two-fold: make the straw bale portion of the building meet code, and then make its interface with regular stud framing seamless.

Conventional and straw bale in Santa Cruz:

The picture at the right is a shot from later on in construction showing what it looked like when the straw bales were placed in between the wood framing.

Also of note is the fact that we were able to go two-stories with the straw bale walls here without a problem.  Cities that are slow to adapt to the latest in sustainable, green building become much easier to persuade when other cities can be referenced as already permitting the act in question.

To the right is just a close-up of what the straw bale walls looked like when installed.  This is also a good illustration of the different elements coming together.  The straw bale is meeting a window on one side, the rafters above, and a stud wall on the left.  The various elements all provide opportunities for mis-coordination if not properly accounted for.  Good communication between the architect and myself early on in the project ensured that this came together seamlessly.

Two story retaining wall:

This project was built into the side of a hill in California.  California being as it is, we had to design for the building to be able to withstand the entire weight of the hill above it in an earthquake.  This took a good deal of steel and concrete, as shown, and we took steps to reduce the overall volume of concrete used by digging slots into the ground to help increase the friction realized by the building in a quake situation.

Alas, we have no pictures of the final product in this case. Because for an engineer, the most interesting part was how we held back the hill…