The Morandi Bridge was a vital transportation link in Genoa, Italy. When it collapsed, officials moved quickly. Its replacement, the Genoa-Saint George Bridge, has set new standards in efficiency.
Season 4, Episode 10: Burçin Becerik-Gerber, a professor in the civil and environmental engineering department at the University of Southern California and director of CENTIENTS (Center for Intelligent Environment), discusses her work on intelligent threat-sensing buildings – structures that employ AI technology to keep people safe during emergencies, including maybe most frighteningly, those involving active shooters.
We also hear from ASCE's Student Ambassadors about how they've...
An 87-story skinny skyscraper, designed by Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron and Canadian architecture firm Quadrangle, is in the planning stage in Toronto. The site, at 1200 Bay St., is at the heart of a new cluster of buildings within the city and along a major east-west axis that delineates the northern edge of downtown. The area also hosts one of Toronto’s...
Editor's note: This article first appeared on August 18, 2015 in Civil Engineering online.
HASHTAGS MIGHT BE READY conversation starters now, but they began simply as metadata tags so that content—be it on social media or otherwise—could be easily searched online. Today, they have grown into the dominant way of organizing large online conversations. This includes the microblogging site Twitter, where hashtags passed through their...
Ben T. Yen, an acclaimed structural engineering researcher and professor emeritus in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Lehigh University, has died. He was 88.
Many of Pennsylvania’s bridges in use around Bethlehem, Allentown, and Easton bear his mark. In fact, he led highly popular tours of the bridges throughout the area.
Yen, Ph.D., P.E., M.ASCE, also led a prolific research career focused on...
ASCE Plot Points Season 4 Episode 9: It's amazing to think that even in the oldest professional in the world, civil engineering, there remain new boundaries to push.
Erica Fischer is doing just that in the field of structural fire engineering design.
Fischer, Ph.D., P.E., M.ASCE, is an assistant professor of structural engineering at Oregon State University. She’s working on the upcoming ASCE Structural Engineering Institute performance-based...
In creating this modern mental health center, the design team had to balance maximum security and patient care while also facing challenging site conditions and program requirements.
The Nixon Forensic Center is an interesting combination of a health facility and detention center. The state of Missouri and WSP worked together to provide an environment in which patients would not feel as though they were in a typical incarceration environment. This had to be combined with consideration for the security and safety of patients and staff.
Each of the six main living units...
The design and construction of the new Nixon Forensic Center represented big changes for the site of the new psychiatric hospital—both in terms of the modern facilities that were planned and the changes that were necessary to prepare the physical site for those facilities. Most dramatically, the site featured a 60 ft drop in elevation from its high end on the northeastern edge of...
