Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates

Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, known throughout the industry as WJE, is an engineering, architecture and materials science firm headquartered in Northbrook, Illinois, founded in 1956. The practice is best known for forensic investigation and failure analysis, and pairs that work with structural engineering, building envelope consulting, materials testing and repair design from a network of offices and laboratories across the country. WJE is providing structural engineering and building envelope services on the $104 million Hotel Florence restoration at Pullman National Historical Park in Chicago, an 1881 Queen Anne landmark being restored under the Illinois Department of Natural Resources’ first major public-private partnership. Much of the firm’s portfolio involves historic structures, distressed buildings and construction defect investigation.

The firm’s origin is a single assignment. In 1956 a young engineer named Jack Janney took a consulting job with the Illinois Tollway Authority, running full-scale load testing and quality control on a highway project built with precast, prestressed concrete girders – a relatively new product at the time and the subject of Janney’s research at the Portland Cement Association. He brought in a former colleague, Dick Elstner, and later his neighbor Jack Wiss. The work involved refining designs, troubleshooting fabrication problems, modeling, instrumentation and load testing, which became the shape of the practice that followed.

By 1962 the company had five employees and about fifty projects a year, and the partners built their own Northbrook facility with a 7,000-square-foot structural testing laboratory. Soon after the move, the National Academy of Sciences hired the firm to load-test three buildings scheduled for demolition at the site of the 1964 New York World’s Fair. Those tests sharpened the industry’s understanding of how concrete buildings fail in punching shear, and Janney later called it the job that put the company on the map.

Capability grew by decade. Through the 1970s the firm pioneered computer-controlled data acquisition for structural integrity testing of nuclear containment structures, and moved into building enclosure work with the terra cotta restoration of the Woolworth Building. The 1984 acquisition of Erlin Hime Associates brought petrographic and chemical analysis in-house. Branch offices followed in Princeton, Denver, Dallas, Austin, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.

Public investigations have followed since: damage assessment after the Northridge earthquake and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the reconstruction of a 94-foot segment of TWA Flight 800, a 90-day safety audit of Boston’s Big Dig covering more than sixty-six lane miles, repairs to the Washington Monument after the 2011 Mineral earthquake, and the forensic analysis of the Champlain Towers South collapse.

WJE now runs roughly thirty offices across the Americas plus London and handles more than 7,500 projects a year. Its Northbrook campus houses the Janney Technical Center, a 70,000-square-foot testing and applied research facility opened in 2018 and among the largest privately owned laboratories in North America, with additional labs in Austin and Cleveland. Field services extend to nondestructive evaluation, instrumentation and monitoring, rope access and drone survey, and litigation consulting on construction claims.