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Lev Zetlin (born July 14, 1918) was an American structural engineer known for engineering such projects as the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair and the Utica Memorial Auditorium. He held a number of patents, which included Structural Floor System Accommodating Multi-Dimensional Ducts (1974), employed in the La Guardia pier; Beamless Floor and Roof Structure (1975), used in the Utica Memorial Auditorium; Cantilever Roof Section, seen in the giant American Airlines Maintenance hangars in San Francisco and Los Angeles International Airports; and Structural Member of Sheet Metal, used in the Alcoa’s famous Paper Bridge. Lev Zetlin had a second career as a forensic engineer. He investigated the collapse of the walkways in the Kansas City Hyatt Regency on July 17, 1981. The collapse killed 114 people and injured 186, making it the most catastrophic collapse ever to occur in the United States. In recognition of his contribution to this field, he was awarded the National Forensic Engineer of the Year Award in 1993.

OVERVIEW

Lev Zetlin was an internationally acclaimed structural engineer who ranked among the leading practitioners in his field.  One would be hard-pressed to identify a 20^th century engineer who did more than him to bolster the vitality and stimulate the advance of Civil Engineering.  His imaginative use of structural shapes and materials, his creative and unconventional designs, and his interdisciplinary approach to problem solving, clearly distinguished him from his contemporaries. So, too, did his embrace of intuition and disregard of conventional wisdom, traits that were rare in his profession.  His ability as an engineer attracted the attention of such famous architects as Philip Johnson and I.M. Pei.  Both of these men engaged Zetlin to work with them on a variety of projects. He could take their architectural designs and translate them into physical reality in ways that refined and augmented their conceptual schemes.  Johnson described Zetlin as "the best engineer I ever had--exciting, imaginative and reliable, a combination hard to get." High praise from one of the leading architects of the period. Moreover, Zetlin’s professional reach was global.  His projects spanned the world, encompassing the United States, Europe, the Soviet Union, South America, the Middle East, India, and the Caribbean.

He rose to prominence during an era in which the contours of building construction were in a state of flux.  Conventional engineering as practiced over the last century was giving way to a new dynamic that introduced new aesthetics, new materials, new concepts, new labor conditions, and a new and greater emphasis on economy.  Dr. Zetlin navigated through this new world with great skill and insight.  In the last half of his career, he also excelled as an expert on structural forensics, investigating some of the most publicized engineering disasters of the late 20^th century. Aware of the forces that were reshaping engineering, he was ideally suited to push the boundaries of engineering design and to quickly ferret out the root causes of structural calamities. For many aspects of both construction and forensic engineering, he accomplished truly ground-breaking work. Professionally, he is best known for his innovations in cable roofs and thin shells, special structures, kinetic structures, dynamic analysis, synthetic materials, and airport piers, hangars, and terminals.

Dr. Zetlin’s engineering innovations and his ability to devise economical solutions to structural problems propelled his reputation. That reputation was further enhanced by his personality and character.  He was extremely sociable, urbane, broadminded, and humorous, often telling jokes and entertaining anecdotes relating to the conversation or situation at hand.  This eminent engineer was also well-rounded: he was a patron and aficionado of the arts, a philologist of some note, and a polyglot. One of his most engaging traits was his lack of pretense.  He was direct without being offensive, devoid of affectation, straightforward, authentic, and amiable.  He could laugh at himself and acknowledge his imperfections.  He did not make assumptions about people but accepted them for who they were.  What he said and did were not shrouded by ulterior motives or by subterfuge.  Nor did he tailor his behavior or his actions with an eye towards achieving a favorable outcome in the future.  He was what one might rightfully characterize as the archetypal straight shooter.

PERSONAL LIFE

Lev Zetlin had a cosmopolitan upbringing.  He was born in Namangan, Russia on July 14, 1918.  Lev was the son of Mayer and Alexandra (Senelnikoff) Zetlin. As a young child, he moved with his family to Tehran, Persia (Iran). There, Zetlin attended elementary and middle schools at American College in that city.  Later, he and his family migrated to Palestine where Lev completed his education.  He graduated from the prestigious Higher Technical Institute (Technion) in Haifa with a Civil Engineering Diploma in 1939.  After graduation, Zetlin began matriculating at City and Guilds College, London University. He graduated from that institution in 1940 with a Diploma in Engineering (First Class).

After the outbreak of World War II, he was commissioned in the British Army and served in that force from 1941 to 1943.  Before deploying to North Africa, he was trained as an intelligence officer.  Throughout the [second] Battle of Alamein, he was on the staff of the British Eighth Army, where he worked in the intelligence section and, because of his engineering expertise, oversaw a number of military construction projects for them.Lev Zetlin was with Montgomery’s Army during Operation Bertram, a deception operation conducted by the Allied forces in Egypt before and during the Battle of El Alamein.  The operation employed engineers, architects, and a host of other technical specialists. It consisted of physical and electromagnetic deceptions that misled Rommel about the timing and location of the British attack (see comments in endnote #10). After his service in Montgomery's army, he was transferred to Tehran where he was assigned to the Russian Army as a liaison officer.  He was an ideal choice: he spoke Farsi and Russian and had lived in both Iran and Russia.

In 1944, he moved back to Palestine where he established a one-person engineering consulting office in Tel Aviv, which he maintained until 1950.  While operating as an independent consultant, he concurrently served as chief structural engineer for what would later be called Israel's Department of Agriculture and Industrial Settlements.  In 1945, he married Eve Shmueli with whom he later had three children: Alexandra, Thalia, and Michael.

During Israel's War for Independence, he served as a company commander in the Haganah, where he learned how to evaluate people systematically, and became the Commanding Officer of the Civil Engineering Division of the Israeli Air Force. He held the rank of Captain in that organization from 1948 until his discharge from the service in 1949. His experience during the war was professionally and intellectually formative.  It was while he was the Commanding Officer of the Israeli Air Force's Civil Engineering enterprise that Lev Zetlin acquired his sense for the intuitive elements behind structural design.  Serving under wartime constraints, he designed and oversaw the construction of transmission towers and other military buildings.  He often worked under tight schedules and dangerous battlefield conditions.  His experience of performing demanding duties under difficult circumstances and with scarce resources sharpened his critical thinking and improvisational skills, which he needed in abundant measure to operate effectively in such an ambiguous and challenging environment.

In 1950, he left Israel to study engineering in the United States at Cornell University. Israel's defense establishment sponsored his attendance.  At Cornell, he refined the knowledge and experience gained in the war and expanded his intellectual horizons.  From Cornell he received his Master's in Civil Engineering in 1951 and his Ph.D. in Engineering (Structural Engineering, Applied Mechanics, Soil Mechanics) in 1953.  He was a Research Associate in Structural Engineering from 1951 to 1953 while in graduate school.  Following his attainment of the Ph.D., he did not return to the Israeli defense establishment as planned but accepted a position as an assistant professor of Civil Engineering at Cornell. Dr. Zetlin remained in that post from 1953 to 1955.  This academic appointment testified to his ability as an engineer: few graduates were accomplished enough to secure such an appointment immediately after earning their doctorate.

Zetlin left Cornell in 1955 to set up his own multidisciplinary consulting firm -- Lev Zetlin Associates, Consulting Engineers -- in New York City, which he founded in 1956.  He later set up branch offices in Boston, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. Dr. Zetlin headed the enterprise until 1971, when he sold it to Gable Industries.  He continued to play a key role in the firm’s operations until the early 1990s.

Throughout his career, Dr. Zetlin maintained a foothold in the academic world.  From 1956 to 1959, he was a Visiting Professor of Civil Engineering at Manhattan College.  During that same period, he was a guest lecturer at Columbia University and the University of Minnesota. Lev Zetlin also served as a professor of Civil Engineering at Pratt Institute, where he held the title of Professorial Lecturer in the School of Architecture from 1961 until 1970 and  Distinguished Professor of Engineering from 1985 to 1987. In 1968, he made a major career move, accepting a position as University Professor of Architecture and Engineering at the University of Virginia, where he served concurrently as the Director of UVA’s Center for Research and Innovation for Building (CRIB); he left that position in 1976.

Dr. Zetlin held a number of other appointments and positions during these two decades as well.  He was a consultant to the Union Carbide Corporation and served as Chairman of that firm’s Research Bureau; a member of the Manhattan College Board of Consultants in Civil Engineering; the Architectural Critic for CCNY’s College of Architecture; a member of the U.S. President’s Advisory Board Panel for the General Services Administration; and an advisor to the U.S. Department of Commerce and HUD on construction and housing.  He was also on the Editorial Board of Building Construction Magazine; President of the International Technical Cooperation Center, an international organization devoted to fashioning sustainable national development objectives for emerging economies; and a member of the International Board of Consultants for the $1.2 billion Montreal Stadium and Olympic Structures.

In the late seventies, Dr. Zetlin began a second career as a forensic structural investigator.  It is at this time that he set up Zetlin-Argo, a firm that specialized in the investigation of structural failures. Zetlin and his firm were hired as engineering detectives to probe disasters and took the lead or played a very significant role in a number of high-profile cases.  He investigated the collapses of the Hartford Civic Center roof in 1978;  the Pleasants Power Station in West Virginia in 1979 (at the time, the deadliest construction accident in U.S. history, responsible for the deaths of 51 workers); the Kansas City Hyatt’s suspended walkway in 1981 (in which 110 people died); the Mianus River Bridge (Connecticut) on I-95 in 1983; the PATH station roof at Journal Square in New Jersey in 1983; the L’Ambiance Plaza Building in Bridgeport, Connecticut in 1987; and the Daytona apartment complex collapse in 1989.

Zetlin was also engaged to prevent disasters.  He was hired by prospective buyers of high-rise buildings in New York City to analyze the impact of high street-level winds on structures and pedestrians.  Dr. Zetlin became so concerned about the wind problem that he proposed new laws be adopted to counteract the dangers of street-level winds.  “The inertia of our profession is to stay just to the building you’re designing,” he declared.  “There should be a city ordinance to make sure that, when somebody designs a tall building, tests are done to prevent severe winds on the street.”

Profiles of and interviews with Dr. Zetlin appeared frequently in prominent publications, among them Business Week, Fortune, Discover, Engineering Today, Progressive Architecture, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, and Modern Steel Construction. Notable newspapers like the New York Times, Hartford Courant, and Detroit News carried feature stories about him and his many accomplishments. Descriptions of his projects and ideas also appeared in leading professional publications, such as Proceedings of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Journal of the American Concrete Institute, and The Military Engineer. Several distinguished scholars wrote books about Zetlin. The most detailed and analytical of these was entitled Emerging Form in Architecture: Conversations With Lev Zetlin. Another book that focused on Zetlin as well as other leading engineers and architects of the 20^th century was written by Ivan Margolius and entitled Architects and Engineers=Structure.

Lev Zetlin himself was a prolific author. In addition to a host of articles appearing in professional journals, he wrote chapters on structural topics for the Handbook for Civil Engineers and the Handbook for Structural Engineers as well as an entry on “Stadiums” for the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Dr. Zetlin also held a number of patents. They included (1) Structural Floor System Accommodating Multi-Dimensional Ducts (1974), employed in the La Guardia pier; (2) Beamless Floor and Roof Structure (1975), used in the Utica Memorial Auditorium; (3) Cantilever Roof Section, seen in the giant American Airlines Maintenance hangars in San Francisco and Los Angeles International Airports; and (4) Structural Member of Sheet Metal, used in the famous Paper Bridge (More about these patents in the next section under Significant Accomplishments).

In his later years, he lived and practiced engineering in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida. He continued to work until his untimely death in 1992.  Lev Zetlin passed away at the age of 74 years at St. Mary's Hospital in Milwaukee.

PHILOSOPHY and METHODOLOGY

Lev Zetlin was a philosopher as well as an engineer.  His philosophy infused the projects he undertook and the courses he taught.  The Philosophy of Engineering and Structure was one of his most frequently offered and well-attended courses at Pratt Institute.  He was fond of quoting various masters to illustrate the principles by which he lived and worked and of lacing his speeches and conversations with philosophical allusions.  Dr. Zetlin appreciated the pragmatism and instrumentalism of Machiavelli and would hand out a copy of The Prince to all engineers upon joining his firm.  One of the lessons that Zetlin hoped his engineers would extract from Machiavelli was a sense for the importance of economy in the projects they undertook.  Aesthetics were important, he would say, but so were cost and durability.

To Dr. Zetlin, engineering was more than facts, figures, calculations, and margins of safety.  It was also a world of imagination, creativity, and intuition. His philosophical approach to life and engineering fed his intuitiveness, which in turn helped him conceptualize engineering projects holistically and look for how all the many separate components of a particular project were connected. Zetlin’s holistic perspective served him well because he lived in an era when the old linear concepts of engineering were eroding.  As buildings grew in height and complexity, old models and methodologies lost much of their relevance.  A new intellectual model emerged, one which promoted an emphasis on an integrated and comprehensive approach to construction and problem solving rather than on the narrowly focused procedures of the past. It was Dr. Zetlin’s iconoclasm that played a key role in forging this new paradigm. 

Many structural design formulas, Zetlin contended, rested on simplified assumptions about the properties of materials, loads, and conditions. He believed that building codes and engineering books brimmed with nonsensical provisions that had no basis in fact.  Many of the fundamental tenets of engineering practice rested on stereotypical approaches and outdated standards that were too unwieldy to adapt to unanticipated engineering conditions.  Construction became—from design to use—part of a complex social, economic, and political system.  Engineers now had to consider a great number of complex variables simultaneously. They could no longer operate in a world of standard formulas and prepackaged reactions.

Lev Zetlin dealt with modern construction issues in several ways. Freed from fixed patterns of thought and traditional methods of engineering, he innovated and approached projects on their own terms.  Zetlin’s world was one of connected force and counterforce, stress and strain. These forces held a building’s structural form together and were susceptible to endless manipulation and adjustment.

Dr. Zetlin insisted on more precision in engineering design and resorted to various methods to achieve this.  Among them was his use of modern analytic tools.  In fact, Dr. Zetlin was one of the pioneers in this field. As early as the 1960s, he employed such tools as computer-aided design programs and wind-tunnel tests to find solutions to construction problems.  Sophisticated stress analysis, mathematical simulations, and optimization algorithms were also pieces of his analytical arsenal. The new analytical tools allowed a more precise calculation of the optimum, which involved a delicate balance among a host of factors -- cost, space, aesthetics, location, and available labor, among others. Zetlin realized that the optimum solution could not be found until all the conditions affecting the problem were known.  And by the late 20^th century, these variables had grown beyond the ability of a single person to comprehend them.  Modern analytical tools could help close the conceptual gap and improve the capacity of the engineer to cope with the new construction calculus.

To deal with the increasing complexity of engineering, Dr. Zetlin also adopted an interdisciplinary approach to construction. He often remarked that we no longer lived in the world of the lone-wolf engineer. The days of Thomas Edison, he quipped, were over. As the building process became more complex, its parameters necessarily expanded.  Engineers now had to consider factors such as architectural requirements, the construction sequence, field conditions, materials, and project economics—factors that they previously had not looked at holistically. A good example of the need for an interdisciplinary approach to engineering was the building of the La Guardia Pier.  In that project, Zetlin had to bring civic and aeronautical engineers together to design a runaway that was viable and affordable.  The former had to redesign the pier while the latter had to widen the wheelbase of the airplane.  Only in this way could an affordable solution be achieved.

Lev Zetlin employed the theme-and-variation method of design. All ideas, once developed and articulated, were later re-examined, refined, and used again. Changes that started as evolutionary building adjustments appeared later as major urban elements.  The hyperbolic panels of Israel’s nuclear reactor were seen a decade later in the gigantic cantilevers of the American Airline terminals in Los Angeles and San Francisco and in a market roof for Montreal.  The self-dampening cable system that Dr. Zetlin patented appeared for the first-time in 1955 with the construction of the Utica Auditorium. It made another appearance in 1964 in the New York State Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair and in his design of a cable system to transport ships across the Isthmus of Panama in 1972. Other engineers borrowed his innovation. For example, the self-dampening cable system was employed in the construction of Madison Square Garden in 1968.

SECOND CAREER as a FORENSIC ENGINEER

Dr. Zetlin’s second career as a forensic engineer became intertwined with the methods and tools he had employed as a construction engineer.  That career took off when he was called in as an expert on a rash of structural disasters that began in the late 1970s and extended through the early 1990s.  Many of these disasters resulted from trends that Lev Zetlin had previously identified and pioneered ways to counteract.

According to Dr. Zetlin, these disasters sprang from the use of traditional engineering and design methods.  The methods used were imprecise constructs that worked fine in an earlier era of smaller buildings and different labor conditions but did not work so well in an era when new materials with different properties, sophisticated structural connections, prefabricated components, and the deterioration of field skill had introduced new dynamics into the construction business. The result sometimes proved disastrous.

Lev Zetlin excelled in his second career and gained quite a reputation as a forensic engineer.  In recognition of his important contribution to this field, he was posthumously awarded the National Forensic Engineer of the Year Award in 1993.  This award was given to innovators who contributed most to the Science of Engineering Forensics, were exemplary in their pursuit of forensic solutions, and guided the development and education of young engineers.

VIEW of CIVIL ENGINEERING

In light of his character and personality, it should come as no surprise that Dr. Zetlin held a rather unique perspective on his profession. He clearly recognized its shortcomings. Engineering, he would say, was not an exact science.  Whatever the image of a Civil Engineer had been before the last half of the 20th century, he felt that image was no longer adequate to meet the contemporary challenges of the profession. The modern Civil Engineer, he was convinced, had to know more than how to calculate torque, tension, and the modulus of elasticity.  Engineers had to be attuned to the needs of society and to changes in human values; be able to apply the immense store of modern technology to their work; and be mindful of the economic capability of our society and of the nation when planning projects.

In this environment, the traditional lexicon and theories of Civil Engineering became obsolete; as did the traditional fragmentation of Civil Engineering into the specialties of sanitary, highway, hydraulics, structural, and other branches of the profession.  The boundaries between the various fields of science were disintegrating, as were the boundaries between the varied fields of engineering.

No field of specialized engineering endeavor, he wrote, could operate in a vacuum independently of other branches of technology or human sciences. For example, sanitary engineers were no longer assigned the function of designing a sewage plant just to process the sewage.  They had to now consider the effects of the operating plant on the environment, the future economic development of the area, the transportation system, and other impacts on the community. He also warned repeatedly that the plant could not be designed by following handbooks: engineering, financing, and all the other functions that affected the construction process had to be considered in the design. And these developments and the responses of users were subject to frequent change.

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