David Friedman officially retired from Forell|Elsesser Engineers Inc. at the end of 2020, after 40+ years where he was past President, CEO, and Chair of the Board. F|E is an award-winning structural and earthquake engineering firm headquartered in San Francisco. As Engineer-of- Record and Principal-in-Charge of over 400 seismic retrofits and construction projects, his work included the base isolation retrofits for San Francisco City Hall and the Asian Art Museum, the adaptive reuse and retrofit for the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the highly innovative seismic safety corrections and remodel of the UC Berkeley California Memorial Stadium, which sits atop the active Hayward Earthquake Fault.
In addition, David is the immediate Past President of the Board of Directors of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI), which disseminates lessons learned from earthquakes, and for which he participated in post-earthquake reconnaissance teams in Kobe, Japan and Wenchuan, China. He has also served as Chair of the Board of the San Francisco Foundation (SFF), San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association (SPUR), and Jewish Home & Senior Living Foundation of San Francisco (JH&SLF). David also served on the Board of Directors of the University of California, Berkeley Foundation (UCBF),and most recently Build Change, a nonprofit working globally to save lives in earthquakes and typhoons.
A licensed Structural Engineer in California, Nevada, and British Columbia, he has a B.S. in Civil Engineering from University of California, Berkeley.
The practicing structural engineer today must not only have a broad understanding of not just structural engineering, but must be knowledgeable about architecture, M/E/P systems, construction delivery methodologies, and the construction process. All projects come with their own litany of challenges and constraints, and the structural engineer is one of the key players in achieving the optimal solution. The project’s budget, the selected performance and design criteria, the architectural form, and the operating systems all affect the selection of the appropriate structural materials and lateral force resisting system. Then the analysis must get translated into a design, and the design must clearly and carefully be delineated into construction documents including plans, details, sections and technical specifications, with appropriate attention to sequencing, phasing and constructability. This all gives rise to the notion of today’s structural engineer as a “Master Builder,” one who can articulate their way through a complex labyrinth of form finding, criteria setting, risk evaluation, design and documentation, and construction (and hopefully not litigation).