Catena Consulting Engineers

Catena Consulting Engineers is a Portland structural engineering practice established in 2005, working on seismic evaluation and retrofit, historic building assessment, mass timber and existing-building renovation across Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. Existing structures are the firm’s centre of gravity rather than a sideline, which matters in a state where a large share of the institutional building stock predates modern seismic provisions. Catena provided structural engineering on the Oregon State Capitol CAMS programme in Salem, the $598 million rebuild that installed 160 base isolators beneath the 1938 statehouse and reopened the building to the public in February 2026. Base isolation decouples a building from ground motion rather than stiffening it, which is why the Capitol’s plaster, marble and Art Deco detailing survived the retrofit intact. Hoffman Construction held the CM/GC contract.

Two things about the practice are easy to miss from a project list.

The first is scale relative to age. Catena was founded in 2005 and cites experience across roughly $5.5 billion in construction volume, which is a lot of building for a two-decade-old Portland office and reflects how much of the region’s institutional work runs through a small number of structural practices.

The second is the range outside the institutional core. Healthcare, higher education, civic and retail projects make up the bulk of the portfolio, but the firm also engineers stage structures for the Pickathon music festival and installations for the Portland Winter Light Festival. Temporary and demountable structures are a genuinely different engineering problem — the loads are unusual, the connections have to come apart, and the safety factors get argued rather than looked up. A practice that takes that work on tends to think about constructability in a way that shows up in its permanent buildings too, which is what the firm claims as its approach.

Mass timber is the other distinguishing area. Oregon has been the centre of North American mass timber adoption, and the design questions — panel spans, connection detailing, acoustic and vibration performance, fire ratings established by char depth rather than by encasement — sit some distance from steel and concrete practice.

The office is at 1500 NE Irving Street, Suite 412, Portland, Oregon 97232, on 503.467.4980. The firm maintains Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and X profiles.