Civil Engineering Magazine

Engineering firms are using a variety of virtual reality technologies to create realistic designs and convey them clearly to everyone involved.

A lack of written documentation can lead to both ethical and legal problems.

The Historic Columbia River Highway, the country's first scenic highway, established how infrastructure could harmonize with the landscape.

The renovation of Los Angeles's Petersen Automotive Museum wrapped the once-boxy building in a new facade that features both an aluminum rainscreen painted “hot rod red” and a surrounding set of curvilinear lines made from stainless steel. It was an intricate and innovative engineering effort that sent the facility into the structural equivalent of overdrive.

Dubbed “the world's most brilliant bridge” at its opening, in 1938, the Easton–Phillipsburg Toll Bridge between Pennsylvania and New Jersey had been more than dulled by time. Its steel structure had corroded—in some cases significantly—from exposure to water, salt, and debris. But a program to clean, paint, and structurally rehabilitate the crossing, which includes what was the longest steel truss in the nation at the time of its construction, has brought the bridge back to life.

Catastrophic levee failure within the critical delta formed by California's Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers could cause serious harm to people, property, and infrastructure while disrupting the state's water supplies and damaging the delta's ecosystem. As it prioritizes improvements to the aging network of levees that keep floodwaters out of the delta, the Delta Stewardship Council is applying tolerable risk guidelines to better inform decision-making processes and ensure the best use of scarce resources. In addition to applying standard risk analysis methodology to assess flood risks to people and property, the council has developed unique metrics for assessing the risks of disruption to water supplies, harm to the delta's ecosystem, and damage to the unique attributes of communities there, risks that are difficult to quantify and express in dollar terms.

The new, 221 ft tall air traffic control tower at San Francisco International Airport represents a bold blend of iconic architectural design and innovative engineering. As striking as it is functional, the new landmark features a vertically posttensioned concrete core that is designed to right itself after an earthquake. Because its height exceeded that allowed by the building code for an essential facility developed by means of a prescriptive design in a region of high seismic activity, the tower became the first such structure in the country to be developed through performance-based seismic design.

It is not only unethical but also potentially costly to make derogatory statements about a competitor.