Strut Engineering & Investment, Inc. ("Strut E&I") is licensed to practice structural engineering in New York and works across Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Founder Emad Badiee holds a BS and MS in Civil-Structural Engineering, has more than 16 years of practice, and is licensed in 28 states and the District of Columbia. Every project we take on is assigned a dedicated licensed structural engineer who owns the drawings, the calculations, and the filing from start to finish.
This is the single most important thing an owner, architect, or co-op board should understand before hiring an engineer. New York City writes and enforces its own Construction Codes, administered by the Department of Buildings (DOB). A building in Yonkers or on Long Island is designed to the New York State Uniform Code; a building in Park Slope or on the Upper West Side is designed to the NYC Building Code, with its own structural provisions, load requirements, and reference standards. An engineer used to filing outside the five boroughs will submit drawings that read as competent everywhere except at 280 Broadway.
Nearly every structural job of consequence in New York City requires a DOB filing, and nearly every filed job triggers special inspections. The mechanism is the TR-1, the Technical Report / Statement of Responsibility. It identifies which special and progress inspections apply to the work — concrete, structural steel, masonry, welding, underpinning, excavation — and names the engineer or agency responsible for each one. Getting the TR-1 right matters. Under-identify the inspections and the job stalls at sign-off; over-identify them and the owner pays for inspections the work never needed. A design professional may also professionally certify a filing, which accelerates approval but places the full weight of code compliance on the engineer who signs it — a responsibility we exercise only where the design fully supports it.
Buildings taller than six stories must have their exterior walls and appurtenances inspected on a recurring five-year cycle under the Facade Inspection Safety Program — the program most New Yorkers still call Local Law 11. The report classifies conditions as Safe, Safe With a Repair and Maintenance Program, or Unsafe. For an owner or board, the consequential part of an SWARMP or Unsafe filing is what comes next: sidewalk sheds, repair scopes, and the engineering behind lintel replacement, anchor and tie repair, parapet reconstruction, and masonry restoration on a wall that has stood for a century. That work sits inside our structural rehabilitation and existing building modification practice, and a property condition assessment is often the right first step before a board commits capital.
A large share of the city's building stock sits in historic districts or carries individual landmark status, so exterior work goes through Landmarks Preservation Commission review in addition to DOB. Structural repairs on a landmarked facade must be designed so the finished condition matches what was there before — the engineering solution and the preservation requirement get reconciled on the drawings, not argued about in the field.
Pre-war load-bearing masonry distributes load in ways modern framing does not. Cast iron framing in SoHo and Tribeca demands a different analysis than steel. Steel-frame high-rises bring their own connection and lateral-system questions. Brownstones have joists bearing directly into brick, and party walls shared between adjoining buildings mean an owner's structural decisions are physically and legally entangled with a neighbor's. Excavation next to an existing structure raises underpinning obligations to the adjacent building — one of the more litigated areas of NYC construction, and one where the engineering has to be defensible before ground is broken, not after. When damage or a dispute has already occurred, our forensic structural engineering and expert witness and litigation support teams handle the investigation and the testimony.
The most common structural request we get in New York City is also the most misunderstood: a homeowner or co-op shareholder wants to open up a kitchen, or combine two adjacent apartments into one. In a pre-war masonry building the wall in question is frequently load-bearing, and removing it requires an engineer to design the replacement beam and its supports, trace the load path down to the foundation, and file the work with DOB. Boards and managing agents require signed and sealed drawings before a permit is issued. This is the core of our load-bearing wall removal engineering service. We also handle vertical additions on lower-density buildings in the outer boroughs and ground-up structural design for new construction. Our full list of services covers both.
Every Strut E&I project is assigned a dedicated licensed structural engineer. Call (732) 334-8086, email info@struteni.com, or contact our team to discuss your project. You can also browse our full range of structural engineering services.