Ivan Viest Ivan M. Viest, an immigrant Slovak engineer who pioneered research in composite construction, earthquake resistance and load and resistance factor design (LRFD) of buildings and bridges, died on Feb. 11 in Bethlehem, Pa. He was 89. The cause of death was not released.Viest's research at the University of Illinois in the 1950s led to acceptance of composite design criteria for steel bridges. Research he then championed for the National Academy of Sciences expanded the knowledge of fatigue and fracture and led to advances in LRFD use.Viest added to his body of work while a manager for Bethlehem Steel
Gerard G. "Gerry" Gilmore, a former principal and senior vice president of architect-engineer HOK Inc., St. Louis, who helped guide its global growth over a 40-year career there, died Feb. 7 in Chesterfield, Mo., following surgery. He was 75. A former U.S. Navy officer who helped run construction operations at the Charleston, S.C., naval shipyard, Gilmore was hired by HOK co-founder Gyo Obata in 1963 and served in top marketing and business development roles and on the firm's board until 2001. He retired in 2004, but remained a consultant until 2010. "Gerry did as much as any individual to take
Stephen M. Levin was a physician, noted construction occupational illness researcher and co-director of the pioneering Irving J. Selikoff Center for Occupational and Environmental Medicine at New York City's Mount Sinai School of Medicine. LevinBut as a carpenter's son, he also could communicate with craft workers and warned of on-site health risks they faced after the 9/11 attack and for decades before. Some 32 years of research and advocacy ended on Feb. 7 with Levin's death from cancer in Rockland County, N.Y. He was 70."To be very honest, I think Dr. Levin was the first one to identify or suspect
Tom Coble, president of Coble Trench Safety, a Greensboro, N.C.-based firm that supplied trench and traffic safety equipment and training to contractors, municipalities and industrial clients in southeastern and mid-Atlantic states, was killed on Jan. 20 when the plane he was piloting crashed shortly after takeoff in Rainbow City, Ala.Coble, who was 58, founded the now 82-employee firm in 2002. It now has 11 locations. CobleA spokesman for the firm says the cause of the crash “has not been determined yet” and is under investigation. The company says Coble, who was alone and returning to North Carolina, had more than 42
WHITAKERCynthia Whitaker, 69, former preconstruction vice president at ISEC Inc., an Englewood, Colo., contractor, died on Oct. 15 of cancer, says the firm. She joined the firm in 1978, retiring in 2005. ISEC ranks at No. 45 on ENR's Top 600 Specialty Contractors list, with $252.5 million in revenue.
Related Links: Remembrance of Lynn Bellenger Contribute to Lynn Bellenger Memorial Fund Lynn G. Bellenger spent 200 days traveling the globe in her 2010-11 term leading the 55,000-member American Society ofHeating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers. But Nancy Jendryaszek, with whom Bellenger co-founded Pathfinder Engineers & Architects LLP, Rochester, N.Y., says colleagues "found it amusing because Lynn was directionally challenged." A leader in energy modeling software development as well as being ASHRAE's first woman president, Bellenger died on Oct. 19 at age 62. The firm did not disclose the cause of death.Bellenger told a Rochester business publication last April of
Burton S. Sperber was a “passionate and accomplished” magician, says the California landscape architecture firm he founded and ran for decades. But it was Sperber's vision and tough business skills, not magic, that built Valley Crest Landscape Cos., Calabasas, into the billion-dollar business it became before recession nipped its bottom line. Sperber, 82, died on Sept. 30 in Santa Monica, Calif., of complications from surgery, says the firm.With only a high school education and experience in his father's nursery, Sperber acquired a small landscape business in 1949 for $700 and was busy as post-WWII California boomed. Valley Crest helped its
Ben C. Maibach Jr., who joined Michigan contractor Barton Malow Co. as a laborer in 1938 and rose to become chairman of what, nearly 40 years later, is now a major U.S. building construction firm, died on Sept. 24 in Farmington Hills, Mich., at age 91.MAIBACHe died of cancer, says a spokeswoman.Maibach, who followed his carpenter-foreman father into the firm, was instrumental in creating its profit-sharing and pension plan in 1951 as a rising executive. It was a first for a U.S. contractor, says the firm.Maibach became president in 1960 and retired as chairman in the early 1980s but was
A. Clive Houlsby, a leading authority on cement grouting methods in dams and large structures who maintained a widely consulted internet site called Rockgrout, died on Sept. 24 in Sydney. He was 82.HOULSBYHoulsby suffered from cancer, says a colleague, U.S.-based engineer Jim Warner. A former dam safety chief of the Water Resources Commission in New South Wales, Australia, Houlsby became a global consultant and lecturer in the 1980s.In the 1970s, he advocated for what was then a controversial change in the water-cement ratio for structural grout. While critics deemed his recommendation as a “heresy,” Houlsby's formula is now standard practice,
Joseph Penzien, a University of California-Berkeley engineering professor who developed the world's first modern shake table in 1972 and pioneered groundbreaking earthquake engineering research and academics, died on Sept. 19 in Redwood City, Calif. He was 86.PENZIENPenzien, a 35-year teaching veteran at the school, was a key developer of its programs in structural dynamics and earthquake engineering, "which many considered to be the best in the world," according to a 2004 oral history conducted by Robert Reitherman, executive director of the Consortium of Universities for Research in Earthquake Engineering.An introduction by Berkeley professor Anil Chopra noted that while Penzien taught
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