Aerial over the site at shell stage: a crawler crane's boom rising beside the raw concrete and block structure, the neighbouring apartment block hard against it, downtown Miami on the horizon.
← Leslie House

The Engineer

An architect draws what a building should be. An engineer of record signs a document saying it will stand up, and puts a licence number next to it. On this house that signature covers a folded concrete roof, a stair with no visible support, and a stainless pool sitting on the roof.

Specification

Firm
Nodal Structures, Inc. — Sunrise, Florida
Engineer of record
Carlos A. Nodal
Florida licence
Professional Engineer 49285 — active
Licensed since
13 July 1995
Special inspector
Qualified 31 October 1995
Code qualifications
Florida Building Code, 7th and 8th editions
Firm founded
Practising since 1995; incorporated in Florida 2010
Scope here
Structural engineer of record — foundations, cast-in-place concrete, structural steel, precast decks, the circular stair

Licence number, licence date, special-inspector qualification and code editions are from the Florida DBPR public record. Firm details are from Nodal Structures' own published material and the Florida Division of Corporations. Nothing here is inferred.

Structural engineering of record.

“An engineer of record is the person who is still responsible for the building after everyone else has gone home.”

Carlos A. Nodal

Principal, Nodal Structures, Inc.
Florida Professional Engineer 49285 · Special Inspector

Carlos Nodal has held a Florida professional engineer’s licence since July 1995 and has been qualified as a special inspector since that October. Nodal Structures works across custom residential, commercial and high-rise structures, and lists cast-in-place reinforced concrete, structural steel and High-Velocity Hurricane Zone construction among its declared competencies — which is, more or less, the list of what this house is made of.

Three elements here carry more engineering than the rest of the building put together. The folded roof planes are the structure, not a covering over one — precast, set by crane, welded and grouted into the load path. The circular stair carries 1¾″ laminated glass treads on HSS steel stringers, designed for 100 psf and a 50 plf guardrail line load, and it had to be sealed and special-inspector stamped before it could be built. And the pool is a stainless vessel that was craned onto a structural deck that had to be designed for it full of water.

nodalstructures.com →

The structure

What a seal actually covers.

The structure itself, before any of it was covered. Block and concrete walls, the folded roof planes taking shape, the…
01The structure itself, before any of it was covered. Block and concrete walls, the folded roof planes taking shape, the crane mast standing in the middle of a lot with no room either side. Everything an engineer of record signs for is visible in this frame and in almost none of the ones after it.
Footing forms and the first reinforcing. The bars leaving these footings are the same bars that end up carrying the…
02Footing forms and the first reinforcing. The bars leaving these footings are the same bars that end up carrying the roof — the sealed drawings start here, below anything anyone will ever see.
A precast element in the air. Lifting a piece this size onto an infill lot is a structural problem before it is a…
03A precast element in the air. Lifting a piece this size onto an infill lot is a structural problem before it is a logistical one: what it weighs, where it lands, and what has to be strong enough underneath it on the day.