Strut Engineering & Investment, Inc. ("Strut E&I") is licensed in Pennsylvania. We serve property owners, developers, architects, contractors, and attorneys across the Commonwealth — Philadelphia and its surrounding counties, Pittsburgh, Allentown and the Lehigh Valley, and the older mill towns in between. Every project is assigned a dedicated licensed structural engineer — the engineer who sizes the beam is the same one who answers the phone when a code official has a comment or a contractor opens a wall and finds something the drawings did not predict. Our 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 plus the District of Columbia.
Construction here is governed by the Pennsylvania Uniform Construction Code, which adopts the International Building Code, the International Residential Code, and the rest of the ICC family statewide. What sets Pennsylvania apart is enforcement: municipalities may opt out of local enforcement of the UCC, and many have. The code still applies, but who reviews your drawings, who inspects the work, and how strictly a provision is read varies by jurisdiction. A township using a third-party agency, a borough with its own code office, and a city like Philadelphia with a full department do not behave the same way. That is a practical wrinkle, not an abstraction: a set that clears review in one township can draw comments across the municipal line. We design to the UCC as adopted, document loads and load paths so the calculations tell a clean story on their own, and handle plan review comments directly rather than routing them back through the owner.
Most of our Pennsylvania work concentrates in Philadelphia, and it is a distinct engineering environment. Permits run through the Department of Licenses and Inspections (L&I). But the defining condition in the city is not the permit process — it is the row home. Philadelphia is a city of attached houses sharing party walls, and a party wall is a structural element belonging to two properties at once. That single fact shapes nearly every residential structural question here. When an owner wants an open first floor, the wall coming out is often carrying joists that bear on masonry shared with the neighbor, and the new beam has to land somewhere that does not overload a pocket in a wall the owner does not fully control. Adding a floor sends new load down through masonry and footings built for a two- or three-story house. Lowering a basement means underpinning a foundation that is also holding up the house next door. Each raises an engineering question and a liability question at once, and the two cannot be separated.
Philadelphia's building stock is among the oldest in the country, and the failure modes show it: unreinforced brick with degraded mortar, bowed and separating façades, rotted joist ends buried in damp masonry pockets, and past renovations that removed bearing without replacing it. The city has also had serious problems with collapses during demolition of adjacent structures, and work beside a shared party wall now carries real obligations to protect the neighboring building. A wall that has leaned on its neighbor for a century was never designed to be an exterior wall, and someone has to engineer what happens when it becomes one. Our work in the city reflects that. Load-bearing wall removal in a row home is our most common Philadelphia request, and it is never a template job — it means verifying what the wall actually carries, designing a beam and a load path down to competent footings, and detailing bearing at a party wall. Second story and vertical additions require an honest evaluation of the existing masonry and foundation first, and structural rehabilitation and existing building modification covers the rest of the older stock. When something has cracked, moved, or come down, forensic structural engineering establishes what happened and why, and where those disputes reach court we provide expert witness and litigation support.
Pittsburgh's problem set is driven by terrain: hillside and slope construction, steep lots where the foundation and the retaining system are effectively one structure, and a legacy of heavy industrial buildings now being converted. A hillside foundation that ignores lateral earth pressure and drainage is a repair job waiting to happen. In Allentown, Bethlehem, and the wider Lehigh Valley, the pattern is mill and industrial adaptive reuse alongside new warehouse growth — and converting a mill means understanding what the original frame was designed to carry, which is rarely what the new use imposes. Statewide, the threads are consistent: freeze-thaw cycling working on masonry and footings, older wood-frame and masonry housing with undersized framing left by past renovations, basement moisture and foundation settlement, and historic buildings that must be modified without being destabilized. For buyers, lenders, and investors underwriting Pennsylvania assets, property condition assessments put a structural opinion behind the numbers, and for ground-up projects we provide new construction structural design. The full range is on our services page.
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.