Forell/Elsesser Engineers

Forell/Elsesser Engineers is a San Francisco structural engineering firm built around seismic performance, including base isolation, performance-based design and the strengthening of historic buildings that cannot be replaced. That specialty puts it on many of California’s harder institutional retrofits, where the structural scheme has to satisfy both a life-safety code and an owner’s continued-operation requirement after a design-level earthquake. The firm is structural engineer on UC Berkeley’s Undergraduate Academic Building, a five-storey mass-timber classroom building on Campanile Way that replaces seismically deficient classroom stock. Combining exposed mass timber with University of California seismic performance criteria on a constrained historic campus site is the kind of problem the practice was built to solve.