In an industry that naturally battles with risk, structural engineer Cary Kopczynski wants everyone to learn to share. It’s for the good of all involved, he says. It’s for the good of the efficiency, constructibility and productivity of projects.

With more than 45 years of experience as a structural engineer, all based in the Seattle region, and 35 years as the principal behind Cary Kopczynski & Co. (also known as CKC Structural Engineers or CKC), Kopczynski has become known for designing high-rise towers in the Pacific Northwest and beyond thanks to his more than two dozen towers of 20 stories or more in Seattle and Bellevue alone and more than 80 regional, national and international awards for engineering excellence. But now Kopczynski wants to be known for something far more personal: collaboration.

“Cary has always been interested in and keenly aware of the problems that face the builders of high-rise buildings,” says Lyall Hadden of Nucor Rebar Fabrication, who has known Kopczynski for over 30 years. “I particularly appreciate his openness to collaboration and his innovative approach to problem-solving.”

Brought in to redesign the Rose Garden Arena parking structure in Portland, CKC’s effort resulted in construction savings of $4 million.
Photo courtesy Cary Kopczynski & Co.

In recognition of his many achievements and impact on the industry, ENR has named Kopczynski the 2025 ENR West Legacy award winner for the Northwest subregion.

An excellent example of Kopczynski’s impact is his championing of materials that improved jobsite productivity. Hadden says it was Kopczynski who pioneered the use of high-strength 100ksi confinement steel rebar in columns and boundary elements, which reduced congestion on the jobsite and sped up construction. The 31-story Escala residential tower in Seattle built in 2009 was the first to combine high-strength concrete and high-strength rebar to expedite the schedule and improve job safety.

“This only happened because Cary put in the time to listen to all the parties involved, understand their challenges and collaborate on a solution,” Hadden says. “Today, he continues that positive and innovative spirit with his support of initiatives like ACI PRO and support of the use of modular rebar to speed concrete construction.”

CKC incorporated the use of high-strength concrete and high-strength reinforcing in the Seattle House design.
Photo courtesy Cary Kopczynski & Co.

Productivity Enhancement

Kopczynski’s work on PRO—short for the American Concrete Institute’s Center for Excellence for Advancing Productivity, an institute he created as president of ACI—is something he’s proud of. The goal, he says, it to help the entire industry by creating a team effort that moves the needle in the world of productivity.

“The fundamental thing we are trying to encourage with PRO is to improve collaboration between designers and builders and suppliers and permitting,” he says. “You might have hundreds of different companies involved in a project, and you don’t always work together; and you are not always incentivized to work together. Because of the way the industry is currently set up and contracts are written, collaboration is often talked about but seldom realized. Too many big projects talk a good story, but even before schematic design is finalized, they are already fighting.”

That’s why Kopczynski focuses on initiatives that revolve around the industry working together, sharing risk proportionally and encouraging innovation by writing contracts that don’t disincentivize innovation. PRO is working, he says, but it is a monumental undertaking up against entrenched practices.

“I think I’m probably most proud of the fact that my efforts to innovate, to improve industry collaboration, improve constructibility of design, that’s really where it starts, my efforts are apparently being recognized,” he says. “I am proud of that because I think the industry really needs it.”

The focus on collaboration for Kopczynski started before he was ever an engineer. Growing up in Spokane, Wash., the son of a general contractor, Kopczynski learned about the industry from a young age. And while he studied to become a structural engineer, after school he wavered between being an engineer or entering the world of construction. He decided engineering and design was his home, working for a few companies in Seattle—every firm he once worked for has since been bought out—before striking out on his own, always with a clear focus that he wanted to be involved in major urban buildings, primarily in the private market.

“When I started my company, initially you are just trying to bring enough work in to keep the doors open and keep payroll on time,” he says. “As we gained momentum and stability, we stayed true to our mission, and our mission was to pursue big urban projects.”

The Lincoln Square South project demanded high seismic requirements while still meeting demanding architectural requirements.
Photo courtesy Cary Kopczynski & Co.

In the early days, Kopczynski says he took advice from a consultant who taught him the importance of saying no in order to stay aligned with his mission. That allowed him to not have his firm swayed by the market and instead led to the creation of the firm’s compass heading early. His first big break came in the late 1980s in Seattle when what is now known as the South Lake Union area started to see development. CKC, as the company is known, picked up a series of the early mid-rise and high-rise residential towers there. He says clients and contractors were happy with CKC’s efforts, and that led to more work.

“It is where we cut our teeth,” he says. “We did a series of projects and got really good and got going.”

Even before launching CKC, Kopczynski knew the value of innovation. He worked on what was then called the Continental Plaza project in Seattle, a 37-story concrete tower, at the time the tallest concrete building on the West Coast.

“It was exciting,” he says, “and I played a key part.” After that project, he became the firm’s manager of the structural engineering department and that solidified his interest in big buildings and helped launch his own firm. “I always had it as one of my major goals to run my own company,” he says.

He had a clear target to run it the way he wanted, focusing on innovation, embracing new ideas and technology and integrating his lifelong knowledge of the importance of industry collaboration.

“The thing I wanted to be different about CKC is to embrace the industry and engage with contractors and subcontractors and steel fabricators to listen to them and hear what they want,” he says.

That effort required building a network and getting their input before finishing a design. He says little things such as knowing what equipment a contractor will use, where on the site they might put a tower crane, how they plan to form a structure or where they will assemble the rebar, is all valuable information for a design.

“The more you know about the builder and how they prefer to build, the more you can adapt the design to the needs of the contractor and build it more efficiently,” he says.

Primarily a West Coast firm, CKC has a home office in Bellevue, but also an office in Chicago and has really taken off throughout the country, especially in the Northeast, Florida and Denver, all helping Kopczynski expand his network of trust.

Kopczynski continues to devote his time to the American Concrete Institute’s Center for Excellence for Advancing Productivity.
Photo courtesy Cary Kopczynski & Co.

Innovative Approaches

Scott Douglas, now a principal at Link Design Group, has worked with Kopczynski since the mid-1980s when he became known as the local go-to concrete guy in the Pacific Northwest.

“I found him to be exceptionally innovative with our office and residential projects built with concrete,” Douglas says. “He was, and is, an excellent educator for young architects like I was in the 1980s, and to this day, still funneling new ideas to senior architects for consideration. I learned to design buildings using many rules that Cary taught me regarding the magic of what concrete can do and not do very well. At the same time, Cary is always game to assist architects with tricky conditions that inevitably happen on every project.”

Kopczynski says staying on the leading edge can be a thorny task in an industry so full of risk. But a risk-averse mindset doesn’t help the industry move forward. “I want to be in a position where I can help the entire industry and help introduce new ideas and help solve problems by being willing to listen,” he says.

Already an ENR Newsmaker two times over for pioneering the use of high-strength reinforcing steel and fibrous concrete in seismic design, he says innovation can be about embracing change and helping lead it. Making that change about the good of others is the differentiator.

“It is one thing to design a building and make it stand up. Any qualified structural engineer can do that,” he says. “Is it efficient? Was there a way by tweaking the design you could speed up the schedule? Does it stand up to the budget? Are you helping the industry build more efficiently and effectively?” Kopczynski has made it his mission to focus not just on design, but design collaboration and productivity.