Collins Engineers

Collins Engineers was founded in Chicago in 1979 and still keeps its headquarters there. The firm designs and inspects transportation, marine, civil and industrial infrastructure, and it runs a dedicated waterfront engineering practice. By the firm’s own count it has more than 300 engineering professionals in 27 offices nationwide. Services run from civil and structural design to energy facilities, construction support for contractors and asset management. On the Stone Arch Bridge Rehabilitation in Minneapolis, Collins was part of the design team LHB assembled in 2019, and it’s credited with the underwater pier repair design. LHB’s project page describes that scope as grouting and repointing at the granite pier bases.

The service line most worth knowing about here is the one aimed at contractors rather than owners. Collins publishes a contractor services practice covering formwork design, temporary support systems, bridge lifts and complex sequencing. That is the engineering of the temporary condition – the falsework, shoring and lift plan that holds a structure up while the permanent work goes in. It is specialised, it is where a lot of construction risk actually lives, and most design firms do not offer it.

Waterfront work is described as above and below the waterline, and the breakdown runs from inspection and evaluation through shoreline rehabilitation design to new coastal facilities and construction oversight. The firm’s own pages show divers working a bridge substructure. Underwater inspection is a narrow capability with its own certification regime, and holding it in-house is why Collins turns up on the submerged scope of bridge projects rather than only the parts you can see.

Energy facilities form a third distinct practice: structural and civil engineering for offshore structures, plus inland renewables. Offshore work imports load cases – wave, current, ice – that a land-based structural engineer does not ordinarily handle.

Civil engineering fills out the rest and is more conventional: site planning, utility design, stormwater management, permitting, ADA design, consultant coordination and construction administration, for commercial, residential, institutional and municipal clients.

The firm also sells an asset management platform of its own, cloud-based, for tracking infrastructure, equipment and maintenance along with capital improvement planning and data analytics. An inspection firm that also owns the software its clients record findings in is unusually well placed – the inspection produces the data and the platform keeps it over the decades that matter for a bridge.

Collins describes 45 years of expertise and positions itself as combining the capabilities of a large firm with the attention of a boutique, across 27 offices.

The headquarters is at 550 W. Jackson Boulevard, Suite 1200, Chicago, on (312) 704-9300.