Abstract
Structural engineers shape the built environment that the public must live in, yet the criteria against which their designs are optimized are not always set by the public itself. Every structure reflects a set of priorities (efficiency, cost, safety, aesthetics, constructability), and the question of whose priorities get embedded in those criteria has significant civic consequences. In the AISC Student Steel Bridge Competition, design priorities are codified transparently in a public rulebook that rewards lightweight, stiff, economical, and quickly-erected structures, producing a clear civic standard against which engineering performance can be measured. By contrast, along New York City's Billionaires' Row, structural engineering of extraordinary sophistication has produced slenderness ratios exceeding 20:1, tuned mass dampers, and foundations driven deep into Manhattan schist, all optimized against criteria set largely by private developers and global capital, producing towers that are roughly 44 percent vacant while the city around them faces a worsening housing crisis. Both projects therefore engage with the same underlying problem: how do the values embedded in structural design decisions shape the civic outcomes those structures produce, and what happens when professional engineering excellence is decoupled from public benefit? Examining these questions across two very different design contexts illuminates the social stakes of structural engineering practice itself.
This year's problem statement sent out by the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) challenged students to design, fabricate, erect, and test a 1:10 scale model pedestrian bridge for a Rio Grande crossing north of El Paso. The competition mimics real world construction and environmental constraints through a variety of restrictions. These restrictions include inhibiting construction from taking place along the riverbank to prevent erosion, maintain a navigable channel in the river, and using 90% recycled material. Our team began an iterative design process in the fall, making use of two finite element analysis (FEA) softwares, SAP 2000 and Solidworks. Working with a steel manufacturer, we purchased $3700 worth of structural grade A36 steel and began our fabricating process in the spring. Fabrication consisted of cutting, grinding, and welding, all of which was performed entirely by our student team. The culmination of our work took place at the competition on April 11th at Old Dominion University. After being put through a series of tests including weight, construction time, dimension constraints, and load testing, our bridge took 3rd place overall out of the nine teams competing in our region. Our bridge weighed in at 380 pounds, took us 19 minutes to build, fit all dimensional constraints, and deflected 1.5 inches under the 2500 pounds (only half of the allowable 3 inches). Though we are happy with our improvements upon last year's team, we acknowledge that there are still improvements to be made.
My STS Research Paper investigates whether the supertall skyscrapers of New York City's Billionaires' Row represent architectural aspiration or architectural alienation, and how New Yorkers' perceptions of these buildings reflect broader tensions around urban inequality. To answer this question, I conducted a qualitative content analysis of approximately 900 comments collected from six Reddit threads and four YouTube videos between 2022 and 2026, coding each into one of six categories: Awe & Spectacle, Aesthetic Rejection, Structural Failure, Vacant Speculation, Civic Harm, and Class Resentment. The analysis is grounded in three connected STS frameworks: Winner's politics of artifacts, Bijker and Pinch's social construction of technology (SCOT), and Jasanoff's civic epistemology. Results show that negative sentiment dominated discourse at 82 percent, with Aesthetic Rejection emerging as the largest single category, though commenters consistently linked visual critiques to deeper social and political concerns. Drawing on Winner, I argue that the public reads these towers as embodiments of an unequal urban order rather than as neutral architecture; drawing on SCOT, I show that interpretations vary meaningfully across platforms and video framings; and drawing on Jasanoff, I demonstrate that non-expert commenters using terms like "tax shelter" and "money laundering" produce critiques that closely mirror Stein's academic account of housing financialization. I conclude that Billionaires' Row represents both aspiration and alienation, but not equally: commenters admire the engineering while condemning the system that produced it, and their discourse constitutes a legitimate form of civic knowledge deserving serious scholarly attention.
