Philadelphia Projects

Pennoni already has left a big imprint on Philadelphia's landscape. The firm has worked on Citizens Bank Park, the home of the baseball Phillies; the 58-story Comcast Center, Philadelphia's tallest building; and 201 Rouse Boulevard, a four-story office building in the redeveloped Navy Yard, where Pennoni also has worked on streets, sewers and electrical lines.

It is part of the team building Cira Centre South, which broke ground in May. The 49-story, mixed-use project has two towers. One is 690 ft tall and will be Philadelphia's sixth-tallest high-rise when completed. Pennoni is also providing multidisciplinary services for the city's next skyscraper, the $1.2-billion Comcast Innovation and Technology Center. At 1,121 ft, the 59-story tower is expected to be the tallest building in the U.S. outside of New York City and Chicago.

Beyond Philadelphia, the expected demand for natural gas presents tantalizing opportunities. Viscuso foresees U.S. natural gas use expanding, including as a fuel for vehicles and for reliable power to facilities like hospitals, casinos and data centers. Critics of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have called attention to its possible dangers, but Viscuso says he believes engineering firms can address those issues. "I'm an engineer, so I believe we can do anything safely," he says.

New lines of business may be helping Pennoni thrive, but so has sticking to a 50-50 balance of public and private projects, says Chuck Pennoni, founder and chairman and a son of an Italian immigrant coal miner. Some engineering firms that relied on housing subdivisions, for instance, collapsed with the housing market last decade, Pennoni says. "For some civil engineers, that was their bread and butter," he adds.

Pennoni Associates, on the other hand, has retained many public clients, even as infrastructure spending has become a political football, something the company's chairman laments. "Money is put aside to preserve the environment," he says. "But where is the money for infrastructure preservation?"

Pennoni typically has about 200 municipal clients, 100 of which it has a long-standing relationship with and 100 for which it works on individual projects. One public-sector client is the Burlington County, N.J., Bridge Commission, which manages two toll bridges that span the Delaware River into Pennsylvania: the Tacony-Palmyra, a 3,659-ft tied-arch span that opened in 1929, and the 83-year-old Burlington-Bristol, a 2,301-ft lift span.

For years, Pennoni has monitored older bridges to make sure they are structurally sound. Recently it has started offering advanced monitoring and modeling technology through its intelligent infrastructure systems division. The firm installed dozens of sensors on the Tacony-Palmyra bridge to provide more accurate and real-time readings.

The sensors picked up a small earthquake and also detected motion during Hurricane Sandy. More importantly, they allowed contractors to pinpoint 24 bearings that needed to be replaced, avoiding having to undertake a larger, more complicated project.