Cultural & Civic
Balancing passion, precision, and innovation for iconic museums, courthouses, convention centers, libraries, performing arts centers, municipal buildings, and sports facilities to create and revitalize lasting sustainable civic and cultural places.
Public buildings occupy a special place in our communities as landmarks, gateways, hubs, and, above all, symbols and expressions of our civic aspirations and cultural values that often stand as some of the most important and aesthetically memorable buildings in a community or urban setting. High-performance civic and cultural buildings require quality interdisciplinary collaborations—and trusted partners. DeSimone has contributed to the development and design of meaningful public architecture in countries around the world.
The realization of each project involves a complex interplay that includes a visionary mission, exceptional design and engineering, financial resources and management, and community and stakeholder participation.
In response to project complexity in this sector, we consider a building’s entire lifespan, from design and site development through construction to ongoing maintenance and eventual incremental renovations and improvements over time. Most important, we have honed a process that enables us to advance the design of a structure early in the process to ensure that the project can meet our clients’ schedule and budgetary goals, balanced with our architectural partners’ design aspirations.
DeSimone’s portfolio of international civic and cultural projects represents close collaborations with many of the world’s top architects, working across the America’s, Europe, the Middle East, and beyond.
The human experience is central to a public building’s function and success, whether its purpose is to offer key civic services or cultural or artistic immersion. The exterior expression of a public building can represent a community’s legacy, and often requires innovative structural engineering—in tandem with façade and building envelope expertise. DeSimone’s in-house teams excel at these collaborations to deliver best-in-class projects.
The structural and system—whether steel, timber, concrete, mass timber, or a hybrid—enables bold aesthetic expression and transparency, creating light-filled inspiring open spaces. We provide clients with extensive analysis on building functionality, maintainability, and future adaptability—critical considerations during conceptual development that lead to a distinctive context, presence, and place.
For more than half a century, DeSimone has collaborated with world-renowned architects to realize thousands of unique buildings and complexes for leading arts and cultural institutions, cities and municipalities, and civic, social, and economic development agencies.
DeSimone’s recent civic and cultural projects include the Statue of Liberty Museum in New York Harbor, the Gehry-designed Princeton Lewis Library, the Broward County Convention Center Expansion and Omni Fort Lauderdale Hotel in Florida, the dynamic Barrymore Film Center in New Jersey, and the Miami-Dade Civil and Probate Courthouse in Miami.
Currently underway, our structural design and detailing teams have created an efficient and sustainable hybrid structure for the Bruce Springsteen Archives & Center for American Music that includes mass timber combined with steel, concrete, and weathering steel. The mass timber elements, such as glulam beams, columns, and CLT flooring, are a significant component of the building’s frame and will be left partly exposed. With exhibit space, research facilities, and a state-of-the-art theater, this visionary cultural facility sets a new high standard for contemporary design.
A beautiful and memorable civic or cultural building must stand as a lasting presence capable of anchoring a neighborhood in a strong sense of civic and cultural pride, community, wellbeing, and creativity. The structural design that creates the cantilevers, pavilions, and statement entrances that define a building contributes to the public experience that makes the building unique.
About us
In an industry in which consolidation has become the norm, DeSimone stands apart from large engineering practices. The diversification of our services enables us to support a global clientele experiencing complex challenges. We remain independent so that we are able to provide bespoke and personal solutions, wherever your vision takes you.
Structural engineering is where we began, and it is still the core of our practice. But through the years, we have expanded the services we offer our clients, from façade and building envelope to vertical transportation to steel detailing and fabrication-ready modeling to advisory services.
