罗伯特·霍尔沃森（Robert Halvorson）领导着像马德里的托雷·塞普萨（Torre Cepsa）和阿布扎比（Abu Dhabi）世界贸易中心（Torre Cepsa）这样的开创性高大建筑的结构设计，罗伯特·哈尔沃森（Robert Halvorson）在康奈尔（Cornell）和斯坦福大学（Cornell）学习了结构工程，他开始热爱使不可能成为可能的挑战。

哈尔沃森说：“在学校里，我被教导说设计确实不是寻求自由。”“这是对约束的搜索，这是真的。如果您没有任何约束，则不知道从哪里开始。没有正确的答案，但是如果您有很多限制，例如要解决的挑战，那么您可以考虑解决挑战或克服这一挑战的创新方法。”

More than 40 years later, Halvorson’s work at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), at his own firm Halvorson and Partners and finally at WSP, where he is executive vice president and global leader of building structures, has met and overcome those challenges of constraint and left a record that has pushed structural engineering forward in the 21st century and earned him ENR Midwest’s 2021 Legacy Award. In 2019, Halvorson entered semiretirement at WSP, although he still works with several longtime clients and advises other structural engineers at the firm.

哈尔沃森（Halvorson）在2016年被公认为是美国土木工程师协会和英国结构工程师学会的院士，并以其金牌向哈尔沃森（Halvorson）授予了荣誉，将他提升到了包括Ove Arup，Ove Arup，Ove Arup，Ove Arup，圣地亚哥Calatrava和Edmund Happold。

年轻工程师

Halvorson began his career at SOM in 1976 and worked in the firm’s Chicago, Houston, New York and London offices. He became SOM’s youngest partner at the age of 31 in 1983, and that same year, Halvorson and fellow engineer Michael Fletcher spent the night of Hurricane Alicia on the Allied Bank Center’s [now the Wells Fargo Center] unfinished top floor, just to see how much the building would sway and if it fit into the design calculations they made for the 71-story tower. The design passed the test. Halvorson is quick to point out that his quick rise at SOM would not have been possible without the mentoring in which the firm takes pride.

“There were a handful of guys there at the time, Hal Iyengar and Stan Korista, who have both now sadly passed away, and some others that spent a lot of time with me and watched me make mistakes and correct them, and those men I owe a lot to,” Halvorson says, “All of us sort of go through that process, but it’s really not so much a formal process. It’s really just spending a lot of hours working on projects together. I spent a lot of time with Hal Iyengar when I worked with them. He was a good friend and just a brilliant, incredible guy. He could get right to the heart of any issue that came up.”

霍尔沃森（Halvorson）在休斯顿办公室的最18luck官网后一个项目之一是一个塔楼项目，SOM的建筑师合作伙伴建议他们去芝加哥，并收到威利斯塔工程师和建筑师Fazlur Khan的意见。

Striking Out on His Own

到1996年，哈尔沃森（Halvorson）准备成立自己的公司，并建立了哈尔沃森（Halvorson）和一些决定与他一起去的工程师的合作伙伴。

他说：“当时市场真的不好。”“我有点感觉自己已经四处旅行，从芝加哥，休斯顿，纽约，然后是伦敦，最后在芝加哥陷入困境。”

Halvorson的公司要做的一件事是，那里有很多前SOM建筑合作伙伴离开并成立了自己的芝加哥公司，并希望聘请结构工程师。

“Our first clients actually were my former partners,” he says. “Lucien LaGrange, Jim DeStefano and others, they actually supported us and got us going.”

随着小公司的成长从一台计算机,一个cabinet and one table, more small projects continued to come in. Halvorson and Partners was brought in for a Chicago skyscraper project that was being planned by the Pritzker family, owners of the Hyatt Hotel chain. The development was scrapped due to economic uncertainty after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but the architect that Halvorson and Partners worked with on the project was Foster and Partners, and that led to a longtime collaboration between Lord Norman Foster and Halvorson.

“福斯特回电，并在马德里（815英尺高的Torre Cepsa）进行了一个项目，并问我是否可以帮助他们，因此这是与Foster and Partners进行漫长而富有成效的合作的开始。这确实，在专业上确实是一件奇妙的事情，”哈尔沃森回忆道。

使用两个外部钢筋混凝土核心为整个塔提供横向和垂直支撑，这是一种从迭代的建筑和结构设计过程中进化而来的解决方案，其目标是创建有价值的无障碍视图和戏剧性的无柱地面大厅。Foster + Partners的另一个项目是迪拜的索引塔。

随着公司的发展，Halvorson指导的年轻工程师的数量也是如此。其中一位是埃里克·芬斯克（Eric Fenske），他从明尼苏达大学毕业后立即加入了该公司。Over a career at Halvorson and Partners, Thornton Tomasetti and at DeSimone Consulting Engineers, where he’s now associate principal, Fenske has been a lead engineer on significant projects in all corners of the globe, serving as senior project engineer on the World Trade Center in Abu Dhabi, for example.

芬斯克说：“在这个规模的公司中，能够成为一些非常大的工作的重要组成部分是我职业生涯中当时的绝佳机会。”

该职业的老政治家

As the firm grew to 40 engineers and other employees, it was acquired by WSP in 2015. Halvorson was an instrumental member of WSP’s leadership, growing the global building structures practice while continuing to deliver clever structural engineering designs that, as one client put it when describing the Hanking Center in Shenzhen, China, “make magic.”

“There’ve been a number of people like Eric who I’ve really enjoyed working with, bright guys who, yeah, maybe I helped them a bit,” Halvorson says, “but they came up with ideas that I never would have thought of. Isn’t that how Socrates did it—the students and the teacher would argue and talk and learn from one another?”

Halvorson仍在WSP为客户提供精选项目，并为技术转移到哪18luck官网些方面以及工程问题不是过去的艰巨任务而感到兴奋。他说：“即使我们能够快速分析这些事情而没有太多痛苦的能力。”“在过去的几十年中，工具和技术确实成熟了。”