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.

Nicholas Forell and Eric Elsesser started the firm in 1960, and the seismic specialization dates back nearly that far. Forell/Elsesser was an early adopter of base isolation and claims a run of industry firsts on the strength of it: the world’s first base-isolation seismic retrofit of an existing historic building, at the Salt Lake City and County Building; the first tall-building base isolation retrofit, at Oakland City Hall; and the largest historic building isolation retrofit, at San Francisco City Hall.

Headquarters is 351 California Street, Suite 500, in San Francisco, with a second office at 1900 Grant Street in Denver and a Los Angeles contact line. Services extend past design into review roles that owners and jurisdictions rely on: peer review, plan checking, value engineering and constructability review. The firm also runs a dedicated non-ductile concrete service aimed at San Francisco building owners working through the city’s seismic screening and compliance requirements, a program that catches a specific and awkward slice of the existing building stock.

Recent public work includes the South San Francisco Community Civic Campus and the city’s Police Operations and 911 Dispatch Center, both cases where the structure has to keep functioning after a design-level event rather than simply protect life and be repaired later.

The practice holds a JUST label, the voluntary disclosure program covering how an organization treats its employees and invests in its community. It also publishes an interactive ArcGIS map so clients can find completed projects geographically rather than scrolling a portfolio.