Aine Brazil.
© 2006 by Steve Friedman
“I think I’ve always had an affinity for just physically putting I things together, even going back to being a child building with Legos,” said Aine Brazil, vice chairman of the engineering firm Thornton Tomasetti, in a 2011 Irish Echo article. These days, with the responsibility of being in charge of some of New York City’s biggest skyscrapers, her building blocks are a lot larger.
Aine Maire Brazil was born on June 9, 1956, in Salthill, near Galway, in Ireland. She attended Salerno, a Catholic high school for girls about which she recalled, “It was a small school with only 120 students and I had a math teacher who came in on Saturday mornings to teach the three girls in my class who wanted to do higher-level math. She gave up her Saturday morning to come in and teach us. The school also provided for me a teacher for physics and chemistry—I was the only one in the class—so that I could prepare to study the engineering.” Aine admitted that, at the time, she didn’t really know what an engineer did.
Growing up, Aine always felt like she had an aptitude for math and the sciences. She noted, “There was recognition in our school that you should really be given the opportunity to pursue whatever career you wanted. My parents were the same. They felt there were no boundaries, and I came to college with that thought.”
When Aine enrolled in an engineering course at University College in Galway, she was one of only three women among the 60 students in the class. She graduated in 1977 with a bachelor of science degree in engineering. While working toward her master’s degree at the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London, Aine was the only woman in her class of 20 students.
When Aine graduated there were few jobs in Ireland, so she moved to London to work with the building firm Arup. There she stayed for five years before moving back to Dublin when the economy picked up. In 1982, she moved to New York. Her boyfriend, also a structural engineer, who is now her husband, wanted to gain experience in the United States, where he was born. They had planned to stay only two years, but that soon changed. Aine explained, “I wanted to spend a couple of years there to get broader experience. I didn’t intend to immigrate and stay in the US. However, when I arrived in New York, I discovered that it was just a fantastic city for a structural engineer to work in. It’s the center for a lot of work done around the United States but also around the world. I enjoyed living here, but I think the work was the major contributor in deciding to stay.”
Aine joined a 45-person engineering firm, Lev Zetlin, and immediately was working overtime her first weekend. The firm eventually changed its name to Thornton Tomasetti and the company now employs over 700 people, making it one of the largest structural engineering firms in the world. Aine was appointed the company’s vice chairman in April 2012.
With a 30-year career with Thornton Tomasetti, Aine has led structural engineering design projects for many high-rise buildings, most of them in New York City’s Times Square area, such as the 40-story skyscraper Eleven Times Square, but also across the country and the world, including Oklahoma’s tallest building, the Devon Tower in Oklahoma City, and Soyak Tower in Istanbul, Turkey.
Structural engineers have received more attention since the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center in New York City. The unique design of the skeletal structures prevented the total collapse of the buildings initially and the possible deaths of thousands more people. “I think after September 11, people understand a little better that there’s a skeleton in each building for which the structural engineer is responsible,” Aine said, musing on the tragedy. “Very few buildings, if any, would have withstood that sort of impact, for as long. Those planes probably sliced through some of the interior columns as well as more than half the exterior columns [on the impacted side], and most buildings would have come down right away. But that design stood up long enough that it probably saved 15,000 lives.”
Recalling standout projects in her career thus far, Aine feels that New York Hospital was one of the more challenging and innovative. “The campus has been in existence since the early 1900s,” she said, “and was built on lots of pieces of land around 68th and 71st Streets on the east side of Manhattan—but there was almost no land available in the area since the early ’60s. The only way to find land to develop critical new buildings was up and over the Franklin D. Roosevelt highway.”
“There’s a certain amount of whistling. I don’t perceive it as sexual harassment, but simply a leftover ‘tradition’ in a male-dominated industry.”
Aine was referring to the fact that the hospital abuts the East River and a six-lane highway beside the river, so major construction work was tricky. “I was there at midnight on a Saturday night when they lifted that first major truss section over the highway using the 1,000-ton crane barge,” she recalled. “They were inches away from the walls of the psychiatric hospital. These pieces were built in New Jersey, 95 feet wide, three trusses together with the frame, so it was 50 feet long. These seven major segments were lifted into place and they did it at night, reopening the highway by six in the morning. Closures were permitted only for about five or six hours.”
Early in her career, Aine had to fight for the respect of men out in the field. At a job site in North Carolina, she said, male contractors listened to her politely but ignored her demands. “I was being ‘yes, ma’amed,’ but then they wouldn’t do what I told them, and I had to go back and get them to fix the problem. Eventually you find a way to gain their respect by showing your knowledge and understanding of the construction process.”
These days, when she has to go out into the field to inspect foundations, steel columns, and roof beams, Aine carefully walks across scaffolds high above the ground. Some of the workers on the buildings are surprised to see a woman under the hard hat. Aine says, “There’s a certain amount of whistling. I don’t perceive it as sexual harassment, but simply a leftover ‘tradition’ in a male-dominated industry.”
Aine Brazil and the Thornton Tomasetti team responsible for structural engineering of the Johns Hopkins Hospital New Clinical Building, the country’s largest single-facility health care construction project.
©John Madere
Aine still speaks with a touch of an Irish accent despite 20 years in the United States. She doesn’t mind standing out in a profession that is still male-dominated. “One thing about the industry here in New York is, if you’re a woman, people will remember you,” she has said. “In any business it’s not a bad thing to be remembered, so long as it’s not for the wrong reasons.” Reaching to ever-greater heights, Aine is currently working on designing the Hudson Yards development in New York City on the west side of Manhattan that will cover six city blocks over old rail yards—once again, a Manhattan solution to “creating land.”
The Big Dig: Reshaping an American City by Peter Vanderwarker (Little, Brown Young Readers, 2001)
Changing Our World: True Stories of Women Engineers by Sybil E. Hatch (American Society of Civil Engineers, 2006)
Engineering the City: How Infrastructure Works by Matthys Levy and Richard Panchyk (Chicago Review Press, 2000)