Strut Engineering & Investment, Inc. ("Strut E&I") provides structural engineering services throughout Washington, D.C. 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 and the District of Columbia. That matters more here than most people expect. The District is its own licensing jurisdiction, and permit drawings must be sealed by an engineer licensed in D.C. specifically — a Maryland or Virginia seal does not carry across the line. Every project we take is assigned a dedicated licensed structural engineer who owns it from the first site visit through permit approval and construction.
Since 2021, when the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs was split apart, permits in the District run through the DC Department of Buildings (DOB). DOB handles intake, plan review, and inspections, and also administers third-party plan review — a path that can meaningfully shorten review time on schedule-sensitive projects. Whichever route a project takes, the structural submission has to hold up on its own: a clear load path, sealed calculations, details a plan reviewer can follow without a phone call. The governing code is the DC Construction Codes, built on the International Building Code with a substantial set of District-specific amendments layered on top. Those amendments are not cosmetic, and an engineer who designs to the base IBC without accounting for them will produce a set that gets kicked back.
D.C. is the rare American city where the skyline is set by federal statute. The Height of Buildings Act caps how tall buildings can go, so development pressure in a very expensive market has nowhere to go but sideways and down. Developers build wide, and they dig deep. That constraint drives an unusual concentration of below-grade work here: deep excavation immediately adjacent to existing buildings, temporary shoring and bracing, underpinning of neighboring foundations, and structural design for multiple below-grade levels. Excavating next to a hundred-year-old party wall, or lowering a basement slab below the footing of the house attached to yours, is a sequenced problem where the analysis and the construction means are inseparable. Strut E&I's team includes a Director of Construction who is a licensed General Contractor, which means the constructability question — can this actually be built, in this sequence, on this site — gets asked while the design is still on paper.
Underpinning to gain basement headroom or add a below-grade unit is one of the most common residential structural projects in the District, and one of the easiest to get wrong. It requires an engineered sequence, pin by pin, with load transfer analyzed at every stage. We design underpinning schemes and provide the structural documentation DOB expects to see.
D.C.'s housing stock is dominated by rowhouses, and a great many of them are brick masonry bearing walls carrying dimensional wood joists — a system that behaves nothing like modern light-frame construction. The masonry is often unreinforced, the mortar is soft lime, the joists bear directly in pockets, and the party walls are shared. Modifying these buildings takes an engineer who understands historic assemblies. Two project types come up constantly. The first is the rear addition or the vertical pop-up, heavily regulated in the District and constrained further inside historic districts, where preservation review governs what can be done and how it must look. Our second-story addition structural engineering work covers exactly this: verifying whether the existing walls and foundations can take another floor, and designing the reinforcement when they cannot. The second is interior opening-up — removing a bearing wall to get a modern floor plan out of a narrow nineteenth-century one. Our load-bearing wall removal service handles beam sizing, new bearing points, and the temporary shoring plan.
For larger modifications to standing structures — change of use, added loads, adaptive reuse — see our structural rehabilitation and existing building modification services. When something has already gone wrong, our forensic structural engineering team investigates the cause, and our expert witness and litigation support practice carries those findings into legal proceedings. Buyers and lenders evaluating D.C. property rely on our property condition assessments.
Washington's construction market is shaped by who builds here: federal agencies, institutions, universities, hospitals, associations, and embassies, alongside private commercial and residential development. These clients bring rigorous review and low tolerance for ambiguity in the documents. Our structural design for new ground-up construction covers foundations, superstructure, and lateral systems for D.C. projects. See our full services list, or reach the office at (404) 480-5555 or through our contact 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.