Before he led the structural design on such groundbreaking tall buildings as the Torre Cepsa in Madrid and the World Trade Center in Abu Dhabi, Robert Halvorson studied structural engineering at Cornell and Stanford, and he began to love the challenge of making the impossible possible.
“In school I was taught that design really isn’t a search for freedom,” Halvorson says. “It’s a search for constraints, which is really true. If you don’t have any constraints, you don’t know where to start. There’s no right answer, but if you have a bunch of constraints, like a challenge to solve, then you can think about creative ways to solve that challenge or overcome that challenge.”