Paul Kassabian

Paul Kassabian

Following Westminster School and Cambridge University, Paul Kassabian joined the structural design firm of Flint & Neill Partnership in London. There he worked on design and assessment of a range of distinctive bridge structures, including Lockmeadow footbridge in Kent and Cleddau Bridge in Wales, and became a Chartered Civil and Structural Engineer.

During this time, a year secondment to contractor Watson Steel saw Paul as Deputy Project Manager for the fabrication, erection, contracts and finance of the Gateshead Millennium Bridge which won the UK Building of the Year Award 2002. This included developing the lift-in-one scheme for the 1200 ton bridge and controlling the landing of the north side on the day.

His interests in structural dynamics and motion control led him to take a Master of Science degree at MIT. There he also took courses at Sloan School of Management and Harvard's Graduate School of Design. He was a teaching assistant in the Civil Engineering Department, advising on graduate lecture courses, projects and theses as well as leading educational visits to Tokyo and Shanghai. He has lectured graduate students in both the Civil Engineering and Architecture Departments.

Now, as a licensed Professional Engineer, Paul is a Senior Engineer in the Engineering Mechanics and Infrastructure Department at the firm of Simpson, Gumpertz and Heger in Boston.

Structural Forms

Built structures are expressions of our society - they represent the particular values of how and where we live. In developed western societies, the form of these structures has followed three distinct stages: function, finance and fashion.

To illustrate this, examples of recent structures in the UK and US will be presented. Both countries have had recent surges in particular structural types. In the UK there have been the national lottery-funded footbridges while, in the US, private educational establishments have commissioned a range of new buildings. These structural types, and the forms they have produced, are expected, or unavoidable, products of the systems of education and practice in each country.

The talk will also highlight the developing area of active shape control, with the example of a new project in Massachusetts, as an alternative way forward that produces structural form independent of values.