Tung-Yen Lin, a visionary
civil engineer known as the pioneer of standardizing use of
prestressed concrete and post-tensioned slabs, died Nov. 15
of natural causes in El Cerrito, Calif. He was 91.
Born in Fuzhou, China, Lin earned
the moniker "Mr. Prestressed Concrete" for introducing
to the U.S. in the 1950s the idea of strengthening concrete
by prestressing it with steel cables.
"The profession has lost one
of the modern pioneers in structural engineering design," says
American Society of Civil Engineers president Patrick J. Natale. "Lin’s
spirit will live on through the bridges and buildings he designed,
and the countless structures that employ his revolutionary
usage of prestressed concrete."
Among those structures are the
Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco and Costa Rica’s
"smiling" Colorado River Bridge. One of his unfulfilled
dream designs was a bridge across the Bering Strait.
Lin was born Nov. 14, 1912, and
received his M.S. in engineering from the University of California,
Berkeley, in 1933. After rebuilding railroad structures in
China during wartime, he returned to Berkeley in 1946 as a
professor. He founded T.Y. Lin International in 1954, then
left in 1992 to found a firm in China (ENR 8/10/92 p. 9).
