Residential
DeSimone redefines skylines, imaginatively transcends residential engineering conventions, and leads the way in exploring sustainability and resiliency strategies—working relentlessly to achieve each client’s vision with trusted service that exceeds the industry norm.
Working with DeSimone, you gain access to our deep experience and outstanding ability to innovate for the unique challenges of each specific residential property type, from flagship, luxury-branded condominiums like the Aston Martin Residences, Dolce & Gabbana Residences, Mandarin Oriental 5th Avenue Residences, to affordable housing like Sendero Verde, the largest Passive House affordable housing development in the world, to sustainable, efficient office-to-residential conversions like the award-winning One Wall Street.
We combine our local knowledge, from residential codes to typical site and climatic conditions, with the broader global resources of our team to deftly balance aesthetics with budget, flexibility with structural and material efficiency, and sustainability with resiliency.
Our specialized, in-house services offers a level of close collaboration and responsiveness that drives excellence, fuels creativity, and results in quality residential projects across housing types.
We relentlessly seek solutions to almost any structural challenge, exploring and modeling different structural design strategies, systems, and materials, including steel, reinforced concrete, timber, and mixed material structures, refining which work best for condos, affordable housing, or market-rate rentals in each location.
Collaborations between our structural engineers and façade and building envelope consultants—for example, at the iconic, stepped curved silhouette of Olympia Dumbo—enhanced communication and empowered our team to masterfully align the design and construction of a customized façade with a complex concrete structure.
Our team’s expertise in wind engineering and vibrational analysis allows us to measure and assess critical factors like strength, drift, and acceleration—and develop highly accurate models and data to optimize structural efficiency, stability, occupant comfort, and resiliency.
This is especially critical for buildings located in hurricane or seismic zones, or for slender, supertall urban towers that rise from smaller footprints and are prone to a greater range of motion than conventional towers.
Our structural engineers and vibrational experts in turn collaborate with our vertical transportation consultants to explore the most advanced, cost-effective and customized solutions specific to residential buildings—including residential renovation upgrades and conversions that often need relocation and complete replacement of elevation cores to better serve units and allow light into living spaces.
We approach each project with a view to maximize sustainability and reduce embodied carbon. As specialists in the adaptive reuse of commercial and industrial buildings to residential and other uses, we have experience in creating voids in slabs, using high-strength, reduced-cement concrete, and strategic post-tensioning to profitably convert older buildings to new uses. By reducing the weight of additional floors through using voided slabs, we make it possible to increase the height of older structures without significant structural reinforcement.
From LEED to Passive House and the specific sustainability or net zero goals at the client, institutional, city, or agency level, DeSimone’s sustainability and Passive House experts play a key role in maximizing the green quotient of every residence, whether it’s employing products like Renco “lego” blocks, Cobiax or similar voided concrete slabs, and mass timber, DeSimone integrates sustainable design strategies where possible in every project.
Our team understands the economic and programmatic factors that drive developments across urban and suburban markets and residential project types.
- Condominiums (low, mid, and high-rise)
- Luxury and Branded Residences
- Market-Rate Rental Apartment Towers
- Affordable Housing
- Mixed-Income Housing
- Low-Rise, Suburban Housing Complexes
- Private Residential Homes
- Mixed-Use Residential, Office, Retail, and Hospitality Developments
- Campus Housing
- Senior Living
- Public-Sector Financed Housing
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.
