Congratulations Darren Paine!

Congratulations to Principal Darren Paine, BEng, CEng, MICE, who has been honored with a well-deserved Outstanding Contribution to the Industry Award from Tall Buildings Media in the UK!

A visionary engineer and leader of our team in DeSimone’s Hebden Bridge office in northern England, Darren has made a profound and lasting impact on the industry—and the skylines of Manchester—through his dedication and commitment to raising the bar for structural engineering creativity, efficiency, and sustainability, delivering pioneering structural design solutions and industry leadership in the UK and beyond.  

Darren led the structural design of the tallest towers in the UK outside London, playing a critical role in the development of the 1.1M SF Deansgate Square and Great Jackson, which includes some of Manchester’s most recognizable skyscrapers—Three60, The Blade, and Crown Street.

Darren’s expertise extends beyond skyscrapers, ranging from pedestrian bridges and the adaptive reuse of neglected buildings to historic preservation and art installations. He’s currently completing work on the Long Eaton Pedestrian Bridge and Contour, the latest addition to Manchester’s Great Jackson Masterplan. In the past, he led the structural design for the Manchester Stadium and Herzog de Meuron’s internationally acclaimed National Stadium in Beijing, China, for the 2008 Olympics. Art installations include Spectra, a poly-chromatic, illuminated tower installation at the Coachella music festival, which continues to amaze visitors annually, as well as Acrobats, an art installation featuring sculptural figures that appear to float suspended in midair over First Street in Manchester.

Before joining DeSimone in 2023 to lead our office in Hebden Bridge, Darren and Principal Deborah Paine, BEng (Hons), co-founded DP Squared—and spent the ensuing 20 years changing the perception of what a small firm of talented, creative structural engineers could achieve. 

As an early adopter of integrated design software, Darren and his team were able to model, analyze, design, and draw complex projects with efficiency and accuracy, benchmarking projects based on overall material use. Reinforcement quantities were extracted directly from the CAD models and combined with the volumetric data from Revit, helping clients understand the efficiency of their buildings as they built higher, and reducing embodied carbon.

Ten years ago, this level of data extraction for a small practice was unheard of, enabling DP Squared to compete at the very highest level. The methodologies, data frameworks, and performance benchmarks developed by Darren have been integrated into DeSimone’s workflows, enhancing the firm’s ability to deliver efficient, high-performance, and low-carbon structural solutions on a global scale.

To celebrate DP Squared’s achievements and their new roles at DeSimone, we last year published a monograph chronicling Darren and Debs’ professional and personal journey. You can find a copy of DP Squared: Twenty Years here: https://www.amazon.com/DP-Squared-Twenty-Hamish-Champ/dp/B0DV3QXYF9.

Pictured with Darren above: Vince Ugarow, Debs Paine