Farzad Naeim

Farzad Naeim is vice president of John A. Martin & Associates of Los Angeles, one of the largest structural engineering firms in the country, and has served as technical director for analysis and design of numerous awardwinning structures during the past decade. One of his most colorful projects involved replicating the Eiffel Tower, at half-scale, for the Paris Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.

Eiffel Tower II, as the project is known, received the Structural Engineering Association of California’s (SEAOC) highest Award of Excellence in 1999, and the American Institute of Steel Constructors’ (AISC) Engineering Award of Excellence in 2001.

The design and construction process involved complex technical and environmental issues, including the desert’s extreme temperature changes, thermal stresses and the possibility of arson or terrorist attacks.

The 50-story re-creation of Gustav Eiffel’s masterpiece utilized innovative welding and manufacturing technologies, creating an interior structure camouflaged with non-structural laces and more than 300,000 “fake” rivets, to mimic the tower’s unique appearance. Plans for the 540-foot-high structure had to ensure that the elevator shaft was never more than one inch out of plumb, and that the tower would remain stable should one of its four legs be destroyed by fire. “One of the nicest things about the project was that I had the opportunity to visit the real tower in Paris a couple of times,” says Naeim.

Naeim has directed other award-winning projects, including the seismic retrofitting of UCLA’s Royce Hall, the Los Angeles Convention Center expansion, the California State University, Long Beach, University Events Center, and the Staples Center in Los Angeles—each of which received the SEAOC Superior Award of Excellence for structural engineering. Naeim currently is technical director for the dramatic design of the new Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, alongside fellow School of Engineering alumnus Vernon Gong (BSCE ’84), who is the project’s manager.

Naeim at the base of Los Angeles City Hall after it was reterofitted to enhance its earthquake safety. Naeim was the chair of the peer review committee for the project.

While working on the retrofit of Royce Hall, he proudly told his colleagues at UCLA, “See, you guys don’t know what you’re doing. It takes a USC engineer to fix your building!”

Naeim credits the training he received at USC Engineering for setting him on the path to success. His graduate adviser was Jim Anderson, professor of civil and environmental engineering, who became a father figure to Naeim. “I worked with Anderson on my dissertation, which dealt with modifying a computer program for creating complex structures,” he says. “On my first day at Martin & Associates, they asked me to help with a computer program that had been giving them trouble for some time. In two days, I had it up and running.”

Since then, Naeim has developed more than 45 software systems for earthquake engineering applications, and is a nationally recognized authority on the evaluation of design ground motion issues as they relate to the design of structural systems. He has performed seismic static and dynamic nonlinear analyses for such landmark structures as the Los Angeles City Hall and UCLA’s Royce Hall and Knudsen Hall. He conducted investigations of the 1994 Northridge earthquake and the 1999 Taiwan earthquake, and edited the first and second editions of “The Seismic Design Handbook,” used in all major U.S. universities.

Naeim calls his wife, Fariba, “the best thing that ever happened to me!” They have two children, daughter Mana, 12, and son Mahan, 7.