The Wright Engineers legacy began in December 1997 when it was founded in Las Vegas, NV. Brent Wright was a principal and partner at a Las Vegas structural engineering firm and had just completed several high-profile projects in Las Vegas including the Stratosphere Tower, the Circus Circus Adventuredome, and the UNLV Lied Library. Brent took out a home equity loan for $75,000 to cover start-up and operating expenses, gathered a combination of cheap new and used office equipment, brought computers from home, and set up shop in a small open office space with blue carpet and a roof that leaked whenever it rained. Thanks to a strong Las Vegas economy, a staff of talented, hard-working people and lots of happy clients who kept coming back for more and bringing their friends, we paid off our start-up loan and even turned a small profit by the end of our first year. We grew quickly and in a short while we’d become one of the largest structural engineering offices in the West.
We added civil engineering in 2001 and MEP in 2002. In 2004, Scott Jones founded our Orange County office. Tye Havey founded our Phoenix office in 2005. In 2006, David Winn founded our Salt Lake City office. Scott, Tye, and David all joined Wright Engineers early in their careers and became (and still are) exemplary in doing things the “Wright” way. In 2014, we opened a Tucson office and began offering geotechnical engineering, material testing, and inspection services in Phoenix and Tucson. Also in 2014, we opened a Las Vegas geotechnical office and testing lab. Beginning in 2015, we made a strategic decision to eliminate disciplines where we could not consistently be world class. The Las Vegas civil department was closed. The MEP departments in Las Vegas and Phoenix were sold in December of 2015. The Las Vegas, Phoenix and Tucson geo departments were sold in the fall of 2017. Today, our focus is providing world class structural engineering in all our offices and world class MEP engineering out of our Irvine office. We’ve been recognized nationally as one of the country’s fastest growing engineering firms, and more importantly, as one of the nation’s best engineering firms to work for – a distinction that we’re particularly proud of. Wright Engineers has five regional offices and principals are licensed in all 50 states.
Our current focus is on structural engineering in all of our offices – Las Vegas, NV; Irvine, CA; Phoenix, AZ; and Salt Lake City, UT. Additionally, our Irvine office specializes in MEP engineering for retail and restaurant projects. We are working on medical facilities throughout Nevada, Arizona, California and Texas, as well as hotels all over the country. A major industry trend towards multi-family housing projects, including student housing, assisted living and apartments have led to our work on those types of projects to be significantly higher over the past few years. Some of our projects are shown in Figure 1.
We utilize AEC technology every day and have been using it since the first day we opened. We began in the late 90’s with AutoCAD and slow pen plotters and smelly blueprint machines. Laser plotters came in around 2000 which eliminated the need for the blueprint machine. From computer modeling structural analysis software to AutoCAD to Revit, there is not a single project we work on that doesn’t involve significant usage of AEC technology. The biggest change that we have seen in the industry since we opened twenty years ago has been the implementation of Revit 3-D modeling. When we first implemented Revit, architects seemed to love it but it was clear that the engineering applications had a long way to go before they would work as smoothly for engineers. Because of this, we were often forced to do a sort of hybrid Revit/AutoCAD work-around.
Today, Revit is much more efficient for us to use, partly because it has evolved and advanced and partly because we’ve become more proficient in its use (Figure 2). The biggest limitation with Revit today is that almost none of our clients - or the owners of the projects who are the clients of our architect clients - are willing to pay for the level of detail needed to fully take advantage of Revit’s capabilities. They seem to believe that using Revit will eliminate conflicts, clashes and the subsequent added project costs and delays, but they’re only willing to pay for a minimum level of detail in the model. This shift in limitation can create unique challenges for us that are different for each project and require us to find workarounds and solutions in different ways.
It would be impossible to be competitive in the engineering world without taking advantage of the advances in AEC technology. These advancements provide us a great opportunity to create competitive advantages by ensuring that we are constantly up-to-date on the latest trends and well-educated in all aspects of those programs.
We consider our approach to AEC technology to be strategic. Wright Engineers was founded during a time of a revolution in AEC technology. In the late 90’s and early 2000’s, the pen plotter was giving way to the laser plotter. The CRT monitor was giving way to the LCD. The cost of memory was dropping steadily as the size was increasing dramatically. Cell phones were becoming smarter. Big data was becoming, well, bigger. It was becoming visually obvious when walking through a firm and looking around if they were riding the technology wave or sitting it out. We decided we would ride it—and thus formed our philosophy around principles of:
These timeless principles have served us well thus far and we strongly believe that continued adherence to them will provide us with continued success. Consistent and continuous investment in talent, technology and training puts your business on the best trajectory to success. In the engineering world, that led us to becoming early adopters of cutting-edge developments in AEC technologies (Figure 3).
One of the biggest challenges is the expense associated with staying on the cutting-edge of new technologies. Licensing fees are very expensive and every engineer needs to have multiple licenses of software. As the software continuously becomes more powerful, hardware needs to be upgraded in order to operate effectively. These upgrades, in tandem with software costs, lead to difficulties in maintaining our place as an early adopter of these technologies.
As technology evolves, we will see the line between engineering and drafting continue to blur. Since the Revit model is the design, anyone working in the model needs to understand design principles. This ongoing evolution will mean that the level of engineering required on a project will increase and pure drafting on a project will decrease.
We would love to see more intelligent design software that operates in 3D without a keyboard, so we could work in a more gesture-based environment like Tony Stark does in Iron Man!
Have comments or feedback on this article? Visit its AECbytes blog posting to share them with other readers or see what others have to say.
AECbytes content should not be reproduced on any other website, blog, print publication, or newsletter without permission.
This article explores the cutting-edge AEC technology applications developed by CORE Studio, a dedicated software development group at Thornton Tomasetti. The applications including Konstru, Swarm, Asterisk, Trace, and many more for design, analysis, collaboration and visualization.
Layer is a new AEC application that was launched close to six months ago to address what seems to be an obvious need in the industry—organizing and integrating the vast amount of disparate data that is typically collected on site during the retrofit or construction of a building project.
Fender Katsalidis describes the implementation of AEC technology on the “Merdeka 118” project, a 118-storey, mega-tall skyscraper under construction in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Upon completion, it will become the tallest building in Malaysia and Southeast Asia, and the second-tallest building in the world.
This article describes the research that was conducted by a team at the Technical University of Denmark to study the impact of COVID-19 on the passenger flow in the Copenhagen Metro, using passenger flow data and station floorplan drawings as well as Bentley Legion software for simulation of pedestrian flow.
