David Scott

Arup, Americas Building Practice Leader; Past Chairman, CTBUH, New York, NY

Extreme Engineering
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Friday, February 18, 2011 – 4:10 pm

Sinclair Lab Auditorium

David Scott – Arup, Americas Building Practice Leader; Past Chairman, CTBUH, New York, NY: David Scott is an award winning structural engineer who has worked on some of the world’s most prominent engineering projects. He is a Principal at Arup, based in the New York office, and is the Building Practice Leader for Arup in the Americas, where Arup has 800 engineers in 10 offices located across the United States. David is a designer and is internationally recognized for his leading role in the design of long span lightweight structures and tall buildings. He leads a large multidisciplinary team of creative engineers to deliver efficient, innovative and beautiful projects around the world. His extensive portfolio includes the Songdo Convention Center and towers, Second Avenue Subway, Hong Kong International Airport, Cheung Kong Center, the Hongkong Bank Headquarters. He is currently working on a 2,000ft tower in Seoul, a 1500ft tower in m tower in Qatar and substantial towers in China and New York. In 2001, David was one of the team leaders working with the contractors in the search, recovery and clean-up of the World Trade Center site after 9-11, as part of the SEAoNY-led effort. Following 9/11 he was extensively involved in the industry review of building design and standards: presenting papers and working with GSA on new standards. He has also written papers on fire performance of structures, progressive collapse, seismic design, wind testing, long span structures and tall buildings. David was appointed Chairman of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat in 2006. During his 3 ½-years of tenure the Council trebled in size. In recent years he has developed an extensive interest in complex geometry structures and has a reputation for finding simplicity in complex forms. He uses a variety of parametric design and modeling techniques to arrive at innovative and buildable solutions to complex shapes. In 2008, David and his team developed and patented a new structural system for twisting residential towers that is more efficient than conventional square box buildings.

Extreme Engineering: Modern computer design and fabrication technology gives architects and engineers the ability to design and build more complex and unusual structures than ever before imagined. This is good and perhaps bad. Many of the tools are easy to use, so that inexperience and lack of understanding can lead to buildings that are horrendously expensive and almost impossible to build. Similarly inexperienced engineers can apply standard codes and design philosophy to super-tall towers and the most complex of structures and assume that their buildings will have a comparable robustness and comparable risk to normal design; when codes are clearly not written with these unusual forms in mind. Yet when used effectively modern tools enable architects and engineers to design efficiency and simplicity into some of the most complex forms and create buildings that are unusual yet easy to build and only marginal more expensive than their square box alternates. Performance based design, whether it is for seismic, wind, fire or other extreme events also allows designers to design unusual buildings with confidence about their performance. David Scott PE will show how these recent advances in design and construction tools are changing the industry. He will show how an innovative and informed approach to design can lead to efficiency and simplicity. These examples include a range of towers and long span structures, that are both simple and complex, but all containing an elegant efficiency and construction led design that drives his work.

The Fazlur R. Khan Distinguished Lecture Series has been initiated and organized by Dan M. Frangopol, the first holder of Lehigh's Fazlur Rahman Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture.