Wind Engineering Pioneer Alan G. Davenport Dies at 76
Engineer and professor emeritus Alan G. Davenport, a pioneer in wind engineering for buildings and bridges, died on July 19 at age 76 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s disease.
Models for many of the world’s tallest and longest structures ended up in the hands and wind tunnel of Davenport, one of the first to use wind tunnels in the design of structures. An engineering professor at the University of Western Ontario, he founded its renowned Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory in 1965. He consulted on the designs of New York City’s World Trade Center, Chicago’s Sears Tower, Toronto’s CN Tower, France’s Normandy Bridge and many others. For Canada, he developed the world’s first statistically based, seismic-hazard zoning map.