Design First. Analyze Second.

What would happen if the structural system wasn't something you hid behind drywall, but the very thing that made the architecture worth experiencing?

Summary

In my conversation with Joshua Schultz (TRXL 220), we explored what happens when architects and structural engineers stop treating each other as service providers and start treating each other as creative partners. Josh is a structural engineer, educator, and researcher at Gonzaga University whose career has spanned SOM's Chicago office, specialty lightweight structures firms, and academia. He and co-author Chris Stutzki recently published Structural Design of Lightweight Architecture, a book that distills nearly 75 years of combined experience into a resource that's equal parts technical manual and creative manifesto.

The conversation covered a wide range of territory: the beauty and complexity of cable nets, grid shells, space frames, and structural glass; the evolution of glass technology from early laminated windshield interlayers to the massive curved panels we see in Apple stores today; and why the most important engineering knowledge often walks out the door when senior professionals retire. But the thread that ran through all of it was a conviction that structure and architecture belong together, that the best work happens when both disciplines are in the room solving problems together from day one.

We also got into the role of computation and technology, not as a replacement for intuition, but as a tool that should sharpen it. Josh made a case that the profession has become over-reliant on analysis software at the expense of fundamental understanding, and that the engineers he most admires always designed first and analyzed second.

What's Inside

• Structure Is Architecture. Why the most powerful buildings of the last century treated structure as the architecture itself, and what that means for how architects and engineers are supposed to be working together.
• Design First, Analyze Second. Why the engineers Josh respects most never let analysis lead, and what that reveals about where the profession may have quietly lost its way.
• The Knowledge Transfer Problem. Why structural engineering may be one of the worst professions at capturing what its best people know, and why a 75-year combined career's worth of insight almost never made it onto a page.
• The Constraints Paradox. Why the most creatively productive projects Josh worked on had the most painful, friction-filled workflows between architect and engineer, and what that implies about what we're optimizing for when we automate the handoff.
• Glass Has Changed More Than You Think. Why a material that weighs as much as concrete became the defining expression of architectural lightness, and what one manufacturing breakthrough changed permanently.
• Go Build Something. Why Josh's most consistent advice for young engineers has nothing to do with software, models, or analysis tools.