Iowa State University Alumni Association| online edition | winter 2004

 


WINTER 2004
Home
Read back issues

Cover Story:
>>Bridges: Designing, Building, Preserving

Feature:
Celebrating 125 Years

Departments:
Getting Started
Letters
Around Campus
Alumni Profiles
Association News
Giving
Sports
Viewpoint


view photo gallery
for this article



BRIDGE MIX

Iowa State’s academic programs have produced hundreds of outstanding alumni who have contributed to the design, construction, and preservation of bridges.

There’s Henry Gee (MS ’51 civil engineering), former senior bridge designer for the Iowa Department of Transportation. Maury Miller (’58 civil engineering), retired vice president for HNTB Companies. Sandra Larson (’88 civil engineering), Iowa DOT’s state bridge engineer from 1998 to 2000. Henry Brunnier (1904 civil engineering), one of five engineers who oversaw the design and construction of the $75 million San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Frank Russo (PhD ’00 civil and construction engineering), structural project engineer for the URS Corporation in Philadelphia. Bret Farmer (’91 civil engineering, MS ’92), engineer with
TKDA in St. Paul.

The list goes on and on, but here are two grads we found exceptionally interesting:

Ben Biller, bridge engineer
Anyone who was around Kansas City, Mo., in the early 1990s remembers when Bartle Hall Convention Center expanded over the interstate in downtown. Most people thought the architects and engineers were nuts.

“The convention center was built in 1976, and the city needed to expand it if it was going to be nationally competitive for conventions,” said Ben Biller (’81, MS ’82 civil engineering). “There was no available land around the existing facility, so we expanded it over the adjacent freeway.”

And so, for all intents and purposes, the convention center became a bridge: a big bridge that was also a building, with a cable-supported roof with four concrete pylons, and a floor system supported by concrete piers set in the medians of the freeway. And don’t forget the aluminum sculptures – those thingamajigs that caused even more controversy than the building itself. What were those things, anyway?

Turns out the “sky stations,” designed by New York artist R.M. Fischer, have become dominant symbols of Kansas City, much like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis
or the Space Needle in Seattle.

Besides designing Bartle’s cable-stayed roof, Biller, a vice president for HNTB Companies, has worked on the New Alsea Bay Bridge in Waldport, Ore., the Hennepin Ave. suspension bridge in Minneapolis, bridges on the Ozark Mountain High Road, and rehabilitation of the historic Eads Bridge in St. Louis. Biller, who specializes in signature bridge design, is currently in charge of HNTB’s Dallas operation.

Al Jennings, concrete form works
When W.A. Jennings (’39 civil engineering) founded Economy Forms Corporation, today known as EFCO, in 1934, he couldn’t have known that his company’s concrete forms would someday be used in the forming of some of the most monumental structures in the world.

Many of those structures are bridges: The 30-mile-long Bang Na Expressway Bridge in Bangkok, the Northumberland Strait Bridge from Prince Edward Island to Canada, the Sungai Dinding Bridge in Malaysia, the H-3 Windward Viaduct in Oahu, Hawaii, the Clark Bridge across the Mississippi River in Alton, Ill. All of these bridges, and thousands more, have been created using EFCO’s concrete forms.

“There have been so many bridges, it’s hard to keep track,” says current EFCO Corporation CEO and chairman Al Jennings (’56 engineering). His company, now 70 years old and headquartered in Des Moines, Iowa, is an international leader in concrete forming technology and continues the Iowa State legacy. The third generation of the Jennings family has graduated from Iowa State, and Bob Jennings (’81 industrial engineering) is now EFCO’s president and chief operating officer.

Read on | Frosty Brrridge Research