The Michael J. Homer Science and Student Life Center, at the Sacred Heart School in Atherton, CA, has just been certified LEED Platinum by the USGBC. The new, two-story, 40,000-sq-ft building incorporates a dining hall, faculty lunch room, auditorium, and a suite of student services offices on the ground floor. To increase the building's lifespan and minimize downtime in the event of an earth shaking, the seismic system can be easily repaired or replaced. The design team was led by Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects.

We'd like to congratulate Tipping Mar engineers Gina Beretta, Nathan Langdon, Justin Spivey, and Tim Strickland on having passed the California licensing exam!

Located just one kilometer from a fault zone that is predicted to produce major earthquakes, the David Brower Center met ambitious sustainability and seismic performance goals thanks to collaboration among the architect, engineer, developer, and contractor. Read the ConstructionWeekOnline article.

The Applied Technology Council and the Structural Engineering Institute of the American Society of Civil Engineers selected Tipping Mar's seismic retrofit project 2850 Telegraph as the winner of the ATC-SEI Top Seismic Project Award in the concrete category. The awards were presented on December 10 at the ATC-SEI Gala Awards Dinner, "Celebrating New Innovations in Seismic Strengthening Over the Last Decade," held in San Francisco. Click on the photo at left to see Tipping Mar's seismic strengthening solution.

The Northern California chapter of the US Green Building Council announced the winners of the Third Annual Green Building Super Heroes Awards, with the Green Team Award going to the David Brower Center. The Green Team, led by architects Solomon ETC, includes Equity Community Builders, Loisos and Ubbelohde, Tipping Mar, Rumsey Engineers, LEED consultants Siegel and Strain, and Cahill Contractors. Tipping Mar's special high-slag concrete mix slashed the project's carbon footprint on the order of forty percent: an additional one million pounds of carbon dioxide would have been expended had the project used a hundred percent conventional cement.

Tipping Mar's entry to the SEAOC 2009 Excellence in Structural Engineering Awards Program received an Award of Excellence in the category of Study / Research / Guidelines. "Corrugated Sheet-Steel Shear-Wall Research" examined a new shear-wall system that can dramatically lower the construction costs of seismic-resistant, multistory, multiunit residential building using inexpensive, off-the-shelf components. Funded by a grant from the Charles Pankow Foundation, it was conducted at UC Berkeley under the direction of Professor Bodizar Stojadinovic and Steve Tipping. You can read the entire report, which details this innovative wall construction.