Structural engineer Sean P. Clifton owes his career trajectory to the liquid “sloshing” damper. As a graduate student at the University of Texas Austin, he watched with fascination as a guest lecturer demonstrated the action of the device—which damps a tall building’s sway—using a 1-ft-tall “homemade” oscillator to represent a skyscraper.
For Clifton, it was a defining moment. “I was a naive graduate student,” says the senior principal with Magnusson Klemencic Associates (MKA), Seattle. “I didn’t know up from down.”