Srinivasa 'Hal' Iyengar

Srinivasa "Hal" Iyengar (6 May 1934 – 4 July 2019) was an Indian American civil engineer and a senior structural consultant, who has been particularly instrumental in the development of innovative and efficient structural concepts and systems for high-rise, long-span and stadium structures.

Early life and education

Iyengar was born in Bangalore, India to a prominent civil engineering family. His father was chief engineer for the Indian state of Mysore in Southern India. In his youth, he traveled with his father to building sites where he found his passion for civil engineering. He graduated from the University of Mysore with a Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering in 1956. .

Inspired by the american way of life through movies and film, He aspired to move to the United States and continue his graduate studies in engineering at an american university. At that time, Indians were beginning to leave India and enroll at American universities to purse graduate studies in scientific or technical fields. He applied for graduate studies in engineering at several american universities.

He went on to earn a master's degree in hydraulic and civil engineering from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore in 1957. Having been accepted in several graduate programs, he moved to the United States that year, and enrolled at the University of Illinois. He earned a master's degree in structural engineering from the University of Illinois in 1959.

Career In 1960, Iyengar was hired as a structural engineer in the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. While there, he bonded with structural engineer Fazlur Khan, a fellow alum of the University of Illinois, who Iyengar came to regard as an "inspiration and a good friend." Passionate about his collaborations with architects during a time when structural engineering was modernizing with advances in computer technology, Iyengar considered it "imperative for engineers to evolve with today's new technologies and be able to reinvent themselves through the powerful process of computer visualization." The building is directly over the top of Liverpool Street Station, a high traffic railroad station. But the rail station could not be touched so no supporting column could touch the ground. To solve this problem three different structural systems were used to support the 10 story tall building over the 78 meter clear span. These were an X-braced truss system, a 10 story catenary suspension system, and a parabolic arch system, resulting in a kind of building-bridge hybrid. He died on July 4, 2019, due to complications from Parkinson's disease and heart disease in Fort Myers, Florida.