Harborview Commercial Tower
Structural Design
My Role
Lead retrofit engineer — vulnerability study, strengthening design and staged certification.
Scope
Steel bracing, column jacketing, parapet anchorage and foundation ties across three wings.
Status
Complete with zero ward closures. Post-retrofit certificate accepted by the insurer.
A 1970s hospital with unreinforced infill walls, a soft ground storey and three hundred beds that could never be decanted. The board needed the building brought up to modern code without closing a single ward — that constraint shaped every decision I made.
Finding the weak points
My screening scored the ground-storey columns and the rooftop plant anchorage as the critical deficiencies. Detailed modelling confirmed it: in a design-level event, the soft storey would concentrate all the drift. Everything in my scheme traces back to that finding.
Strengthening while occupied
I designed steel braced frames for the open ground floor, fibre-wrap jackets for the brittle columns, and full parapet and plant anchorage — then phased it wing by wing, with noisy works scheduled outside clinical hours. Infection control stayed intact throughout, and nursing staff later told me patients barely noticed.
Responsible for an ageing facility? See my seismic assessment service or book a screening visit.
More selected work
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