The structural engineer helped realize what architects envisioned
Robert Silman, the prolific structural engineer who died of cancer at his home in the Berkshires last month ?? , was at his best when great buildings needed his help.
Twenty years ago, when a section of Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece in Pennsylvania, was drooping seven inches, he developed innovative ways to fix it. A consensus builder, he presented his ideas at a public forum before implementing them. ''This is an icon, and I want to do it right,'' he said.
Silman was a patient teacher, walking reporters through the causes of Fallingwater’s structural problems and the reasoning behind his planned repairs. And he could turn a phrase. Explaining the effect of temporary girders shoring up the house’s sagging balcony, he stated pithily: “The cantilever isn’t a cantilever anymore.”
Silman wasn’t an architect, but he had as much impact on the built environment as any architect of his generation. In the 52 years since he founded Robert Silman Associates (now known simply as Silman), the structural engineering firm has handled more than 24,000 projects, according to its president, Joseph F. Tortorella. He maintained decades-long relationships with many prominent architects. “He was the rare engineer who had an understanding of design,” says James Polshek, who turned to him repeatedly. Ann Beha, the Boston architect, who worked with Silman on dozens of projects over 40 years, says, “He was completely absorbed by possibility, with making our ideas reality. He saw structures and architecture as partners.”
An NYU-trained civil engineer, Silman worked for Ove Arup & Partners in London and Ammann & Whitney in New York before starting his own Manhattan firm in 1966. At first he took whatever jobs came in—which included rehabilitating burnt-out tenements. Those jobs, which larger firms didn’t want to touch, established Silman as a preservation expert. Soon he was getting calls about Ellis Island (where he helped turn the crumbling main building into an immigration museum) and Carnegie Hall. There, working with Polshek he engineered the building’s 1980s renovation and the later creation of the underground Zankel Hall.
Fallingwater was just one of many Frank Lloyd Wright buildings Silman helped restore. They included New York’s Guggenheim Museum, where he used lasers to map the building’s surfaces in preparation for a facelift. Silman advocated resurfacing the Guggenheim with carbon fiber, to give it the pristine finish that Wright envisioned. The restoration architect, however, opted for a bumpy surface that ostensibly revealed the building’s craftsmanship.
Though it became best known for its preservation projects, the firm (which now has 170 employees in Boston, New York, and Washington) engineered thousands of ground-up buildings, including, in recent years, Renzo Piano’s Whitney Museum, Steven Holl’s new public library in Queens, SANAA’s Grace Farms in Connecticut. Altogether, the firm has worked on buildings by 14 Pritzker Prize winners, according to Nat Oppenheimer, its executive vice president and senior principal.
In recent years Silman spent as much time as he could at his farm in Great Barrington, Mass., with Roberta, his wife of 62 years. She said that her husband was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 1984 and in 2017 learned he had myelodysplastic syndrome, “another bone marrow cancer, which developed as a result of chemotherapy.” But he continued working until June, both at his Boston office and at Harvard, where he taught a course called Philosophy of Technology. Thousands of architecture students there and at other universities (including Columbia and Yale) benefitted from his teaching. Silman “inspired interest in what engineers do,” says Karen Frome, an architect who took the course in the late 1980s. In recent years, he subtitled the course “Technology and Responsibility.” “What are our responsibilities as we design the built environment?” he asked in the course description. “What do we owe the future?”
“He was a throwback, a mensch,” Oppenheimer said, adding that, at Silman offices, “It was never about having the biggest firm or making the most money—it was about having fun and doing a good job.”