Design x Milad Oliaee
Structural Engineer
Illustration by Bonnie Kate Wolf
Interview conducted by Z. Fleischer on September 20, 2020
What has been the most meaningful experience for you in your journey of becoming an engineer?
It would be during research in Italy, after completing what an engineer on the West Coast (of the States) would need to be successful. I felt unfulfilled in my studies, and I wanted to explore different knowledge around the field. I felt like the competitive, career-focused thinking in the States was limiting my growth as an engineer. I researched other less-trodden paths where I could apply the same principles of structural engineering to problems that were less popular or well-known.
“I felt like the competitive, career-focused thinking in the States was limiting my growth as an engineer.”
Structural engineering is centered around high-cost building, where money isn’t really an issue. That’s been fueled by high-rise buildings or large stadiums developed through computer engineering software in the ’70s. What these tools have not addressed are large volumes of buildings greatly impacted by things like seismic risk. There were earthquakes in Eastern China, Turkey, and Italy that affected buildings not accounted for in that software. I realized these buildings could be better understood. The curiosity for me was in trying to understand where the cutting edge was for that field. My research guided me to professors in both Spain and Italy. I worked briefly under one in Barcelona, but after seeing their computers weren’t strong enough to achieve proper results, I went with the other professor in Italy. I wanted to help humankind with future earthquake disasters through my research.
Earthquake disasters have more than just structural engineering behind them. They also have to do with policy, social normalcy, and the history of construction practices. It was great in that I had to really apply myself beyond my perceived limit in protecting people and better understanding buildings to quantify earthquake risk. At the same time, it made me realize it’s not just a science problem.
Is it also a technological problem?
Yes, the tools we developed were for newer buildings. There are other types of buildings that are cheaper and more prevalent in parts of the world that this software doesn’t accommodate. I spent up to seven years focusing on that data and applying it to the Italian national code for European building safety as a benchmark. How we set the standard is really what’s putting the public at risk. If the standard isn’t reflecting risk adequately, then that’s how these disasters occur.
How has being an engineer shaped you as a person?
The easiest answer is that it’s allowed me to become more of an analytical thinker. There are laws in programming or physics where everything is clear, but people are not that way. With people, a lot of it has to do with feelings like comfort. People can be very black-and-white, but usually we all deal with so many complex thoughts and emotions in our interactions. You don’t really pick this up unless you go through that training or get exposed to it. This thought process has allowed me to step back and look at myself from a third-person point of view. Being an engineer has really helped me understand the experience and reality beyond what I’m feeling—what other people are feeling.
This thought process has also helped me evaluate my relationships with people in a less subjective manner. I don’t think anyone’s relationship should be put into a program, but it really helps to digest complexities around human interaction. It helps me examine the influence of complex, interconnected feelings, which is extremely beneficial in maintaining and improving relationships in both business and social contexts. In the end, we rely on people to live. We are all interconnected. By becoming more aware of the driving force of each human we come into contact with, we can improve the quality of our relationships.
What drew you to structural engineering, over other areas of engineering?
There are many elements, but if I reduce it down, I think it was a level of confidence that I had with the tools required to engage in engineering.
Structural engineering becomes a business at the end of the day. There are textbooks that show you how you analyze things. It really comes down to being a representative of any construction project. You have to be the person responsible for buildings being built in a safe way to code. There are projects that go beyond the code where you have to use your personal judgement. You usually have to deal with money and you’re delegated to take action whether the code tells you one thing or the other. If you don’t feel comfortable with what’s happening and you’re being held liable, you need to make decisions for the project and communicate that to the necessary powers in the building design in order to make a positive impact down the road. There could have been a bad design decision at some point that could be exacerbated through years of occupancy in a building, which could later on cause an issue.
Structural engineering isn’t rocket science, but the main talent you should have to be successful is spatial thinking or 3D thinking. This means being able to visualize complex geometries, understand how they operate, and be able to reduce it all to a single line equation where a “yes” or “no” answer will be acceptable. Sometimes it’s not very straightforward. Even if we have plans—like large drawing sets that show the building in different views—you have to come forward with those 2D images and create a 3D concept before it’s built. You have to understand all the complications that come along with the construction process before it begins.
What has helped you simplify complex problems in these situations?
It’s a fundamental understanding of physics, understanding where things move. There’s this theory called the free field of displacement and virtual work. Within that field, all possibilities can be expressed finitely. 3D shapes and how they move—a basic understanding of some very fundamental laws of spring theory and things like that—can help you determine possibilities without going through calculations. If we take this huge complex building and reduce it down to its weak points, we focus on one weak point, then move onto the next. It doesn’t require any calculations—it just requires experience and a really good understanding of those theories that I briefly discussed.
Can you tell us about how you’ve innovated within the field of structural engineering?
New materials are being invented at quite a rapid pace with respect to the history of the construction industry, like mass timber. During the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, light wood-frame buildings caught on fire and brought half the city down to rubble. Now we have explored ways and developed manufacturing processes that make wood less flammable, better for the environment in terms of carbon capture, and just more sustainable. As long as costs are kept low, it’s a desired area to practice. What they’re doing is making these slabs—these big blocks of wood—that are being assembled off-site, delivered, and just plopped in place. It’s a lot simpler than bringing stick-framing in and having to nail everything together. It saves a lot of time and labor. Time and labor are pretty much the driving forces of high construction costs right now, which in turn are impacting the housing crisis.
I innovated in that area by using what I learned about masonry vaults in Europe. Masonry vaults use compression-only arches that exude the strength of the object’s own geometry for the purpose of reducing loads to these slabs, so that the slabs can be thinner and lighter. Now, a high-rise building can be half or one-third the weight. That increase in efficiency multiplies exponentially when you get to large building heights. The structure is exponentially impacted by the scaling weight per added floor.
Is this related to the process you created in which new floors can be added onto skyscrapers?
Yes, this was a parallel venture. Most buildings are single-design, meaning there’s a premise for the building, there’re investors that come into the site, there’s a density around the planned site, and there’s what the building department in that city is allowing to be built on that site. What this venture does is recognizing that most buildings don’t have a 50-year design life—they last much longer, and cityscapes can change around that building over time. You see neighborhoods become more popular and also die out like those within Detroit. Instead of locking in the materials and the building tech in that one instant in time, when this building’s built, why not allow for these buildings to grow and shrink as needed? In more simpler terms, just grow as demand increases.
The problem with this is that when you’re designing a building for a certain height, the structural materials and the foundation system are designed for that specific height. The challenge of allowing buildings to grow is somehow devising a way where you’re not putting money upfront at the moment that it’s built, but finding a way to go back later without much additional cost for the building to become taller. Construction gets so much more expensive as time goes by due to inflation, with increasing costs of labor as these urban centers become even more developed. The additional cost of building taller buildings from scratch greatly outweighs the cost if there were a provision to the building footprint and the design to allow for stories to increase over time.
Can you tell us about the program you’re developing where AI and robots are the ones who plot land, hire people, and erect the building?
This is a multi-disciplinary feat. This building information technology incorporates all disciplines into one model: architecture, engineering, plumbing, mechanical, and landscaping. This has allowed for some automation of structural analysis and networking of teams who digest metadata. These teams talking amongst themselves can create a field of possibility in a data set. That data set can be available land for purchase across North America. We can understand the return of investments for that potential site by going through this complicated process that I was describing earlier: investors come in and fund a project, someone behind that money decides how they want to build, they express that to an architect, the architect comes up with a concept, they go to the structural engineer, the structural engineer sees if it’s feasible, and the other trades come in to see how the building is going to operate. That is all happening without anyone involved in this program.
During my studies abroad and during my Ph.D., I developed a program that allows for structural design at the most sophisticated level that they do for earthquakes in California or for tall buildings in Japan. I populated that realm of certainty in the structural design to this network of tasks: finding what land has the highest ROI, creating the footprint of the building to maximize floor efficiency, and then structural analysis and design of the price system. That price of construction impacts the rate of return on that project. When you reduce the time and cost of an analysis to a second, a computer with a relative accuracy of 20% can predict what would happen if you were to pay $200,000 for a team to come together and provide a solution. Now you’ve created a solution without three to six months of lag time, and you can pick from a matrix of over a million other options across the US for the best area to build your next building.
Now, anyone with money can use this tool to develop without having specific connections or specific biases on where they think they should build. They can have this calibrated tool backed up by either runtimes or AI. There’s a safer way to invest money than what currently stands within the construction industry. A lot of people have money to help out with developing cities, but they have no connections. This age-old industry is based on familiarity and things like that. If this software can become successful and be adopted by cities, then there could be a lot of improvement with the rate at which projects get approved and built. This can address the pacing demand of housing and basically anything regarding cities.
How will robotics play into this?
The program I was specifically speaking about is for the purpose of deciding where to build. You would then select an instance of the analysis the computer program comes up with. That computer program assumes you’re going to build a certain way. Those assumptions, made by us, involve the automation of construction through robotics. This means that the type of building we’re specifying is more buildable by a robot: there are far fewer parts that go into the building, they are manufactured offsite and placed together with minimum fastening required, they are simple enough for a robotic arm that’s incrementally elevated up the building height to repeat every floor. Robotics are faster at building than humans and can work around the clock. There’s less safety hazard. Safety protocols inhibit the pace of construction quite substantially. The scaling of most buildings in urban centers repeat the building each floor, so if you can program just one floor for a robot to build, all of a sudden you can build a skyscraper—you just elevate the robot every story.
Can you tell us about the process you’re developing that breaks down complex structures into simplified pieces that are assembled elsewhere?
This is called panelized modularity. It allows for the flat-packing of large parts of a building—walls, floors, plates—to have the priority of shipping as the design requisite. Modular construction understands that the bottleneck on maximizing the simplicity of a building and minimizing the number of parts has to do with how you transport the building components from manufacturing center to construction site.
Based upon this information, can people buy a house and keep it with them for life?
Yes, this is another component of modular construction—the disassembility of a building. Let’s say, once it’s built, the design incorporates ways to break down into parts that are maybe a little bit larger than before but much more manageable by freight on public roads. This will change the whole industry, in that land is the main lead for any construction project. Usually the land that anything is built upon is funded through a loan with a bank. Now you have a house that can move lots—the land and the building are no longer tied. This opens up different financial strategies to fund your housing and allows you to keep your home the way you designed it when you want to move somewhere else.
How do you approach solving innovation-based problems?
For my field especially, looking at other fields and applying their ingenuity towards specific instances proves beneficial. I think the construction industry is really slow in adopting new tech, just because of the overhead and the infrastructure that needs to be set up to build things at the price point that they are at today. Lumberyards, metal fabrication shops, steel plants—all of that has a low price point right now, but as they change in the future other building types can be introduced. Looking into other materials and taking ideas from other fields that have been experimenting with new materials is the future of innovation.
“For my field especially, looking at other fields and applying their ingenuity towards specific instances proves beneficial.”
This came about when I realized earthquake disasters are more than just about structural engineering. Becoming innovative in my field is quite simple. When you stop thinking about things the way everyone else is thinking about them and you look at the field from the public’s perspective, you learn from that.
Which innovator—structural engineer or otherwise—has had the greatest impact upon you professionally?
There’s an engineer in San Francisco who works at the firm responsible for designing the tallest tower in the world. His name is Mark Sarkisian. He’s very active in academia still, even though he’s a practicing structural engineer, which is uncommon. He’s come up with patents for building systems that most engineers would shy away from. The bread and butter of engineering is project-based. You don’t really make much money innovating on systems and selling them, or by getting intellectual property rights from them.
What do you believe the future of structural engineering holds for society? How do you plan on being a part of this future?
Integrating computer tech into the industry more is the future, as well as the automation of building design decisions. This will reduce errors, increase efficiency, and increase the capability of what we’re building. This is already happening. It’s just going to keep growing in other aspects, for instance, through construction typologies and construction sequence methods.
I think my involvement with the companies I’m engaging with has already been reflecting this. I’m engaging with companies that view the construction practice holistically. I’m engaging with manufacturers of cold-form steeling machines. These companies want to maximize the use of these machines, so that one little machine that’s maybe 20 feet long can produce a whole building that’s 1,000 feet by 1,000 feet. I’ve also been engaging with the startup that has brought about all this tech development in growing buildings. Increasing my relationships with people, maintaining those relationships, and consulting for them in the future allows me to have more than one approach for success.
What drives you to innovate within the field of structural engineering?
It’s survival. If you don’t innovate, you’re left behind. The previous generation of engineers have been left behind. Things have already changed so significantly. Keeping up to speed on new developments is critical, especially if you want to continue to attract new clients.
“Keeping up to speed on new developments is critical, especially if you want to continue to attract new clients.”
Is there a connection between your analytical approach to relationships and the idea that your key to survival is having the right relationships?
I think that’s an explanation of recent successes that I’ve witnessed. I understood that working with other engineers that are closed-minded was not for me. Once I opened up myself to more unconventional employment opportunities, I felt more valued as an engineer and the reward is higher for my services. This has significantly improved the quality in all areas of my life, and this has given me autonomy to learn more things. This is interesting because you would think that the conventional firm or office has many other engineers practicing, and you’re able to learn from them, but things are really so competitive. You don’t really learn from the other engineers. It’s kind of sad, but that’s just the reality—that’s capitalism, I guess.
Rapid Fire Questions
What’s your favorite thing to do in your free time?
I love playing soccer. I have an athletic background. I used to love to just work out, bike, swim, and run. Soccer is really interesting to me because it’s so simple. You’re getting a ball into the goal on the other side, but there’s strategy and teamwork behind it. Most of the problems I’m dealing with these days involve many different people working together. Now I can practice teamwork in a safe environment. It’s also beneficial to my health. It’s exciting. It’s kind of like a social, strategic, and athletic endeavor, all three in one. On a good day, it improves my mood and keeps me upbeat.
What is your favorite book or podcast?
I’ve been listening to this podcast by Lance Armstrong called THEMOVE. It’s not a very political podcast—it just talks about the sport of cycling from someone who dominated the scene 20 years ago. He gives his perspective on the sport today, 20 years later.
What or who inspires you?
I think the idea of getting somewhere on my own really inspires me. I see a lot of successful people who have maybe had the advantage of being supported by external factors. I’d really like to get to where they are on my own. That’s what inspires me.
If you could live anywhere, where would that be and why?
I had that opportunity with the startup in Malaysia, but Los Angeles has also been very rewarding for me. I feel the culture here resides with me—there’s a kind of resonance and energy in regards to big-picture thinking that you can only find in cities like Los Angeles.
How would you describe yourself in three words?
Introverted, healthy, and determined.
What was your favorite childhood toy and why?
There’s this erector set called K’Nex that you could build 3-foot-tall roller coasters or small race cars with. They had a set number of parts and a manual. I found myself really getting lost in focusing on that, no matter what was going on outside of that moment. It really taught me how I wanted to spend my time on this earth—being focused, becoming absorbed in tasks, and problem-solving. Half of the reward was the outcome, just seeing the thing built and coming back to it days after, seeing it still built. That makes me feel that my limited time on earth is put to good use. It’s not a coincidence that I ended up becoming an engineer.
