Leslie Earl Robertson

California-born structural engineer Leslie “Les” Robertson ranks as one of history’s most important designers of noteworthy high-rise structures. He is responsible for the structural engineering of hundreds of spectacular and complex skyscrapers and mixed-use facilities around the world, and his cutting-edge work has helped set today’s standards for the design of tall structures as well as large-scale facilities of all types. Among his prominent building designs are the World Trade Center (New York, N.Y., Fig. 1), U.S. Steel Headquarters (Pittsburgh, Pa.), Century Plaza Hotel (Los Angeles, Calif.), Meyerson Symphony Center (Dallas, Tex., Fig. 2), Shanghai World Financial Center (Shanghai, China, Fig. 3), and Bank of China Tower (Hong Kong, Fig. 4).

A creative pioneer and visionary of new engineering concepts and applying computers in design, Robertson’s work has greatly advanced the art and the science of structural engineering theory, not only for skyscrapers but for long-span roofs, domes, and bridges. Engineering News Record (ENR) named him its Man of the Year in 1989—featuring him on the cover of its publication—for his innovations and “pioneering new design concepts.”

Robertson is quick to point out to up-and-coming young engineers that “innovation should not be sought for its own sake. Nor should it be undertaken unless substantial rewards and the full understanding of clients and investors are realized. Innovation is what happens while in the design process. The goal is to design great buildings in the total sense—to meet societal, artistic, structural, and financial goals.”

When involved in innovative design, he urges emerging engineering leaders to “always understand the big picture and the costs, as well as your own part of each project. Make sure that whatever you design can be built or produced. At the end of a project, always ask yourself, ‘How could I do it differently and better next time?’”

Robertson was born in southern California on February 12, 1928, the second son of Garnet Roy and Zelda (Ziegel) Robertson. He was named after the movie star Leslie Howard, a family friend. Howard, originally an English and Broadway stage actor, proved to be a natural for the talkies in the early 1930s because of his excellent stage-trained voice. He’ll forever be remembered for his role as Ashley Wilkes, the honor-bound disillusioned intellectual southern gentleman, in the 1939 movie Gone with the Wind. Howard died in 1943 when his namesake was only fifteen years old.

Les’s older brother Taylor Donald Robertson, earned his living as a forester. Their father, Garnet, did a little of everything, including inventing things for use in whatever field he was in at the moment. According to Robertson, he spent time in Chicago “as an acoustician changing lovely old vaudeville theaters into cinemas.” He characterized his father as being “an inventor, machinist, manager, rancher, salesman, and seaman, with lots of stops between. He had a wonderful ability to see things. Little escaped his vision.”

Robertson dropped out of high school when he was sixteen years old to enter the U.S. Navy where he was an electronics technician’s mate. After World War II, he attended the University of California at Berkeley on the G.I. Bill. He acknowledged that, without the bill, he would never have been able to afford a college education from such a prominent university. His major areas of concentration at Berkeley were mathematics, electrical engineering, and civil engineering, in that order. In addition, Robertson was influenced by the university’s activism and antiestablishment elitism. He said, “It taught me a lot about broader goals, personal freedoms, and people.”

When Robertson graduated with a bachelor’s of science degree in 1952, he was twenty-four years old, restless, eager, and in search of his destiny. He began by working for two well-established California-based engineering firms, Kaiser Engineers (1952–54) and John Blume and Associates (1954–57), and with the New York-based company, Raymond International (1957–58).

“My first job after graduation was as a mathematician,” said Robertson. “Using mathematical tools rare for electrical engineers at the time, I worked out the distribution of electrical power in large (for me) power grids. Then I got interested in the catenaries, length of insulators, distance between anchor towers and the like. Again, I relied on the mathematical tools not carried by others in the design team. After sorting out that issue, I addressed the dynamic loads on the anchor towers, then the design of the towers themselves. With that experience, I became a structural engineer.”

Joe Nicoletti, retired partner of John Blume and Associates, recalled, “When Les first came to Blume, he was assigned to a major job in the office—the Rincon Island and Causeway project, which dealt with oil drilling off the southern coast of California. Because state law at the time required offshore drilling to be done on a ‘natural’ island, Les was given the task of determining the optimum profiles for the stone slope protection on the island to resist wave and earthquake forces. So he built a tabletop model and conducted experiments for several months. Les took a lot of good-natured ribbing about playing in the ‘sand box’ and I still like to kid him about it every time I see him.”

After working in California and New York, Robertson found his way to Seattle in 1958, where he landed at a progressive consulting engineering company then called Worthington Skilling. “I had great opportunities there,” Robertson remembered. A landmark project for him was engineering the IBM Building (Pittsburgh, Pa.) for architect Minoru Yamasaki, which started a long relationship.

Robertson became a partner in the Seattle firm when it was reorganized. When he was thirty-five years old, the firm opened a New York City office to execute a Yamasaki mega-project, the World Trade Center (WTC). In 1967, the company was renamed Skilling Helle Christiansen Robertson (SHCR), a name that would last sixteen years. Robertson became the partner in charge of the New York office, moving to the “Big Apple” and directing the engineering of the two World Trade Center towers, one $417\text{meters}$ high and the other $415\text{meters}$ high.

Ray Monti, chief engineer for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey at the time, recalled that “Skilling was responsible for the initial planning and concepts for the World Trade Center, but as the project progressed, it became clear that Robertson was the fulcrum on which structural decisions were made. This young man was obviously brilliant, intense, and dedicated.”

When the Seattle and New York offices split in 1982, Robertson renamed his east coast operations Leslie E. Robertson Associates (LERA). Today, the firm’s five partners, William Faschan, Elias Matar, SawTeen See, Daniel Sesil, and Richard Zottola, serve clients on five continents. Its projects, both overseas and domestically, range from the monumental to the moderate. Designing award-winning, super-tall buildings and long-span structures has become the firm’s trademark.

Robertson’s business trips in the first half of 2008 included stops in China, Columbia, Dubai, Hong Kong, Japan, Lahore, Macao, Portugal, Qatar, Shenyang, and Spain, but he feels especially at home in southeastern Asia. His current projects are many, including the Museum for Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar, and the Miho Chapel, Japan, both with architect I.M. Pei.

Robertson, who is licensed as a first class architect and professional engineer in Japan, is also registered as a structural engineer in California and a professional engineer in New York. He holds four patents, two in the United States: one for a viscoelastic damper for buildings, and one for elevator cable dampers. In Japan, he has a patent for a long-span structural system, and, in Europe, a patent for a cable stabilization system.

One of LERA’s most celebrated skyscrapers, built in the late 1980s, is the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong. At one time, this $369\text{-}\text{meter}$ -high structure was the world’s tallest building outside of the United States and the tallest with a composite structural system. “It’s the ultimate, ultimate composite building,” said Joseph Colaco, head of CBM Engineers in Houston, Texas, and another internationally respected high-rise designer.

Robertson designed the building’s central composite steel and concrete system to take the lion’s share of the lateral and gravity loads. Its giant diagonals, which are also part of the wind and gravity system, are steel box members filled with concrete. The composite action of the concrete in various structural elements created a space frame structure that required only 50 percent as much steel as typical all-steel frame buildings.

In addition to the World Trade Center and Bank of China towers, within Robertson’s extensive portfolio of significant works are several favorites listed here (the comments in quotes are Robertson’s).

Much sought-after for speeches, Robertson said, “Each year, both domestically and overseas, I deliver a dozen or so seminars, lectures, and the like.Recently, I spoke in Chile, Germany, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Mexico, Romania, and the United Kingdom.” Within the United States he’s made presentations at numerous universities, including the University of California, the University of Illinois, Cornell University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Notre Dame, and Stanford University. He has delivered Yale University’s Gordon H. Smith Lecture, MIT’s Felix Candela Lecture, and George Washington University’s Frank Howard Distinguished Lecture.

Robertson is the author of more than 300 papers on structural, earthquake, and wind engineering. He also teaches fall and winter classes at Princeton University where he’s the professor for one undergraduate class and one graduate-level class. His subject is the design of large-scale structures. Said Robertson, “For my students, I teach the obvious and the fundamentals, and the premise that if you wish to become good at something, you practice, practice, practice, and you always chase the better idea.”

Certain of the impact the profession can make in society, Robertson advocates that engineers get involved beyond engineering. He said, “It seems to me that if engineers of today would develop broader interests, they’d better be able to make our world a better place. When you’re not involved in non-engineering activities, you’re not living. I would counsel all engineers to get out from behind their computer screens and participate in the vital, rough-and-tumble world that swarms about us. Giving five hours a week to a cause beyond personal gain and family is not an unreasonable goal. For me, the issues are peace not war, human and women’s rights, freedom from government surveillance, global warming, drilling in the Arctic Refuge, and the like.”

Active in many professional organizations, Robertson is an honorary member in the ASCE, American Institute of Architects New York Chapter, Structural Engineers Association of New York, and the National Society of Romanian Engineers. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering; Architectural Institute of Japan; Japan Structural Consultants Association; and Architects, Designers, Planners for Social Responsibility, a group that educates the public about the danger of nuclear war.

Robertson is a fellow in the Singapore Structural Steel Society and New York Academy of Sciences, and an honorary fellow in the Tokyo Society of Architects and Engineers. He is also on the Committee on Human Rights of Scientists for the National Academy of Sciences, where he is an associate member.

The California native was founder and past chairman of the Wind Engineering Research Council. He serves (or served) as a director for the Architectural League of New York, Skyscraper Museum, and MacDowell Colony (the nation’s oldest artists’ colony). He was chairman of the Council of Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat for three years, and a member of the Committee on Bombing Preparedness for the Japan Institute of Architects, as well as the Commission on Engineering and Technical Systems for Federal Construction Design Criteria.

The engineering advisory boards he has served on include those for Columbia University, Penn State University, and the University of California at Berkeley. He holds honorary degrees from Lehigh University (Doctor of Engineering), University of Notre Dame (Doctor of Engineering), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Doctor of Engineering), and University of Western Ontario (Doctor of Science).

Among his many awards and honors are:

When Robertson and his wife SawTeen See aren’t traveling, they reside in either their high-rise apartment in New York City or their home in Connecticut. See, a native of Malaysia and also a noted structural engineer, is managing partner in LERA and partner-in-charge of many of the firm’s projects. The two, who were married on August 11, 1982, are both distinguished members in ASCE, the first husband and wife ever to be honored this way (Fig. 7).

Robertson is the father of four children, two of whom are engineers. Self-confident, intense, candid, and when relaxed, introspective and philosophical, Robertson loves listening to Brahms and following other contemplative pursuits soothing to the soul. Over his life, his hobbies have included skiing, sailing iceboats, wind surfing, mountain climbing, and racecar driving.

An acknowledged leader and believer of the engineering profession, Robertson allows, “I’m overly supportive of structural engineering as a career because the profession has been so good to me. Being a structural engineer brings a level of personal satisfaction not found in other disciplines, and does so at all levels of achievement, at all levels of salary, and at all levels of longevity in the profession. At what other endeavor can one be engulfed in the joy of seeing one’s efforts molded into a modern masterpiece? And getting the sensation, ‘Hey, I did that!’”

And so, at age 80, the self-proclaimed “workaholic” structural superstar, with great pride, points out, “I still average $240\text{hours}$ a month on my time sheet.” And he enjoys every minute of it and every part of being a structural engineer, championing creative and efficient structural engineering systems internationally.