Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)
Observations, impressions, and the fundamentals of engineering are all foundational attributes of structures conceived to create new manifestations of art and architecture. Purpose, inspiration, and application are the guiding principles essential to creative design. Historically materials and the techniques of installation have enabled unique structures. Recently, analytical tools and performance ingenuity of lead to new approaches to structural design. Research has led to transformations in both art and architecture.
Lecture will focus on examples of unique structures developed for art and architecture. The work contemplates issues of the environment, material proportioning and placement, and conceptual underpinning of new ideas. Investigations into self-stabilizing structures built by skilled labor and potential futuristic approaches using robotics will be shown. The application of machine learning to structural design and construction will also be presented. All of the examples shown is based on actual project work recently developed at SOM.
Mark Sarkisian, PE, SE, NAE, LEED BD+C, is a Partner of Structural and Seismic Engineering at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in San Francisco, California. He received his BS Degree in Civil Engineering from University of Connecticut where he is a Fellow of the Academy of Distinguished Engineers and his MS Degree in Structural Engineering from Lehigh University. He also received an honorary Sc.D degree from Clarkson University and an honorary MS degree from the Politecnico di Milano. In 2021, he was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in the United States. His career has focused on developing innovative structural engineering solutions for over 100 major building projects around the world, including some of the world’s tallest. Mark holds 14 U.S. and international patents for high-performance seismic structural mechanisms and environmentally responsible structural systems. He teaches studio design courses at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Cal Poly, California College of the Arts, North Carolina State University, Northeastern University, and the Pratt Institute and has the written the book entitled “Designing Tall Buildings – Structure as Architecture” with the second edition recently released by Routledge -Taylor & Francis.