RDI got a nice shout-out from Thornton Tomasetti

KingdomTower_Adrian_Smith_and_Gordon_Gill_Architects_LoRes — A rendering of the 1,000-meter-tall Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia, for which Thornton Tomasetti is serving as structural engineer. Photo: Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architects.

Thornton Tomasetti is a highly regarded structural engineering firm–and the structural engineer of six of the ten world’s tallest buildings that are built or under construction, including the Kingdom Tower in Saudi Arabia, which at over 1,000 meters will be the world’s tallest. In recent years, the firm has expanded into sustainable design with the acquisition of Fore Solutions in Portland, Maine and Simon & Associates in San Francisco, and the company is increasingly focusing on resilience. Thus, I was thrilled that RDI was highlighted in Thornton Tomasetti’s Winter 2013 Newsletter. Check out the “We Like” section at the bottom.

David W. Orr, Ph.D

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics, Emeritus. He also served as “Counselor to the President” of Oberlin College for ten years. He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past twenty-five years he has served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, Bioneers, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

He is currently a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Children and Nature Network, and the WorldWatch Institute. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012), and a lifetime achievement award from Green Energy Ohio and the North American Association for Environmental Education. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and as one of “52 game-changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design +Construction in January, 2016. He was instrumental in the design and funding of the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center. He is the founder of the Oberlin Project and a founder of the journal Solutions. His current work is on the state of American democracy.