Strut Engineering & Investment, Inc. ("Strut E&I") is licensed in Maryland. We work for property owners, developers, architects, contractors, and attorneys from Baltimore City down through the Washington suburbs, out to Annapolis and the Eastern Shore. 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 — but Maryland work is done to Maryland's rules, and every project is assigned a dedicated licensed structural engineer who stays with it from first site visit through permit and construction.
Maryland regulates construction through the Maryland Building Performance Standards, which adopt the International Building Code and International Residential Code statewide. What the MBPS does not do is centralize enforcement. Local jurisdictions may amend the adopted codes, and permits and inspections are handled at the county or city level. The practical result is that Baltimore City, Montgomery County, and a small Eastern Shore town are three genuinely different review environments, with different amendments, different submission requirements, and different reviewers who have seen different failures. We design and detail to the code as the reviewing jurisdiction has actually adopted it, document loads so the calculations tell a clean story on their own, and answer plan review comments directly instead of routing them back through the owner.
Baltimore is a row house city, and that single fact drives most of the structural engineering that happens inside it. The typical block is a continuous run of brick masonry bearing walls with wood floor joists framing into them, party walls shared between neighbors, and a construction date frequently well over a century in the past. Nothing about that assembly is bad engineering. It is, however, an assembly with no redundancy: the wall your joists bear on is the same wall your neighbor's joists bear on, and mortar that has been weathering since the 1800s is not the mortar the original builder specified.
The dominant renovation market in Baltimore is the row house rehab, and it almost always involves structure. Owners want the first-floor partition between the front room and the kitchen gone, a rear addition where the old kitchen ell stood, or a roof deck on top of a joist system that was never designed to carry occupancy loads. Each of those is a real structural problem. Load-bearing wall removal in a row house means sizing a beam, following the load path all the way down through the first floor and into a footing that may be shallow, unreinforced, and bearing on fill — and doing it in a building where you cannot simply add a column wherever the math would prefer one. A second story addition or a rear pop-back raises the same question in a different order: can what is already there carry what you want to put on it, and if not, what has to be reinforced first. Party-wall conditions make this specific to Baltimore rather than generic. Work on one house structurally affects the next one. Notching a shared wall for a new beam pocket, underpinning a foundation to deepen a basement, or removing lateral bracing that the adjoining house has been quietly relying on are all decisions with a neighbor on the other side of them. We evaluate the shared wall as a shared element, because that is what it is.
Vacant and deteriorating row homes are a well-documented citywide problem, and their structural consequences do not stay inside the vacant property. A roof open to weather for years saturates the joists and the top of the masonry; when a vacant structure partially collapses, the occupied houses on either side lose the lateral support and weather protection the shared wall was providing. Owners next to vacants, and developers acquiring vacants to rehab, both need to know what they are actually holding. Forensic structural engineering answers why a wall moved, a floor sagged, or a section came down, and what it means for the buildings still standing. A property condition assessment answers the underwriting version of that question before money changes hands. Where it ends in a claim or a dispute between adjoining owners, our expert witness and litigation support practice carries the findings into the legal process.
Montgomery County and Prince George's County are dense, largely built out, and redeveloping in place. The work there is additions, second stories, basement excavation and underpinning, and gut renovations of mid-century houses whose framing and foundations were sized for a different program than the one now being imposed on them. Both counties run their own permit review, and both expect drawings that show the load path rather than assert it. Annapolis and the Eastern Shore are a different problem entirely. Waterfront and near-waterfront construction brings flood zones and design flood elevation requirements, elevation of existing structures, wind loads that govern uplift and connection detailing, and a marine environment that corrodes connectors, anchors, and reinforcement steadily and invisibly. Piers, bulkheads, and waterfront accessory structures live in that environment full time. So do the fasteners holding a house together three blocks inland. We engineer for the exposure rather than adapting an inland detail and hoping. Statewide, Maryland's climate adds freeze-thaw cycling to everything exposed — masonry, footings, slabs, and any crack that lets water in and holds it. Expansive soils in parts of the state and foundation settlement in older housing stock account for a steady share of the cracked walls, sloping floors, and sticking doors we are called out to look at. Where an existing building needs to be adapted rather than diagnosed, our structural rehabilitation and existing building modification practice handles the reinforcement and the sealed drawings. For ground-up work, we provide structural design for new construction. The full list is on our services page.
Every Strut E&I project is assigned a dedicated licensed structural engineer. Call (404) 480-5555, email info@struteni.com, or contact our team to discuss your project. You can also browse our full range of structural engineering services.