Structural engineer Vincent J. DeSimone—an innovator with an outsize personality known for his ability to creatively support his architect-clients as they curved, twisted and stretched their building envelopes—died on Nov. 16, just two weeks shy of his 79th birthday. The cause was cancer.
“He was a very knowledgeable, smart, competent professional and an outrageously funny guy,” says Richard L. Tomasetti, who worked with DeSimone in the late 1960s. “We just couldn’t wait to see what he would say next,” adds Tomasetti, consultant and founding principal of structural engineer Thornton Tomasetti.