Happy Holidays from St. Louis HOK Structures group! May your New Year be joyful and structurally sound!

The US has unfortunately seen a record amount of tornadoes this year, in fact a total to date of 1151 tornadoes with 875 in April alone.  Compare that to a year ago this time of 566 tornadoes (total!).*

Picture courtesy of  Dan Gill for The New York Times

It’s very disheartening to see the death and destruction that a tornado leaves behind.   The St. Louis area saw the Good Friday Tornadoes sweep through terrorizing the area and Lambert International Airport (see Gyo’s response to the airport’s damage, pictured above). Not even a week later, we saw the Tuscaloosa Tornado killing hundreds …

On Thursday, June 24th, HOK St. Louis kicked off our 2010 St. Louis Arts and Education Council Campaign which runs until Friday, July 2nd. Founded in 1963, the Arts and Education Council has raised $95 million that has been distributed to local arts organizations who provide music, dance, theatre, visual arts, literary arts, film, art education and community outreach programs. They are the only privately-funded arts umbrella organization whose geographic reach benefits the 16-county, bi-state area of St. Louis.

Last year’s event (http://hoklife.com/2009/07/20/makeup-anyone/) was a theatrical makeover. This year was Dancing With the HOK Stars! We …

If you’re in the design industry, I’m sure you’ve heard of BIM.  Building Information Modeling is the newest way engineers, architects, and other designers convey the art we produce.  At HOK, we take BIM very seriously, setting aside time to make a day of it.  November 5 is BIM Day!

HOK is on a journey to buildingSMART.  As such we have a large bank of BIM resources (HOK’ers, click here for your support).  For those of you outside of HOK (and even those within), here is what Miles Walker (an HOK firm wide BIM leader) had to say about BIM.

We have officially retired

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Not too long ago, fellow HOK blogger Justin wrote about the perception of architects.  I rather enjoyed that blog and wanted to do a sort of counter/comparison with the perception of engineers.

For starters, I went to a search engine and typed in “structural engineer” images.  I was not surprised to see some rather silly images…but also a lot of construction site images…

The next thing I did was to ask around to see what the perception was of an engineer, or …