Feature Articles » Dream Jobs 2004

Dennis Shelden: Turning Dreams into Reality

Age:

38

What He Does:

Develops computer tools for architectural design

For Whom:

Gehry Technologies LLC

Where He Does It:

Los Angeles

Fun Factors:

Surrounded by visionaries; has a great many difficult, seemingly unsolvable problems to wrestle with; and belongs to a firm that gets tremendous recognition for its work as it creates landmark after landmark

Frank Gehry's acclaimed new Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles is all sweeping curves, strange angles, and huge glistening slabs. It is a steel flower so revolutionary that when Gehry first designed it in the late 1980s, it seemed impossible to build. In fact, work stopped in the mid-1990s as costs soared.

But while the Disney project languished, there was another revolution going on at Gehry Partners LLP, a technological one. And computer scientist Dennis Shelden was in the thick of it.

Gehry Partners had begun using software developed for aircraft design, a computer modeling system called CATIA. CATIA, short for computer-aided three-dimensional interactive application, got its first major workout in the design and construction of the striking Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, completed in 1997.

The Bilbao Guggenheim was already under way when Shelden joined the firm in 1997 as director of R and D. He was hired to work on software that would let designers collaborate with colleagues working at other sites. But as one of the most technically savvy people at the firm, Shelden soon found himself tapped to extend the capabilities of CATIA by developing original software. For CATIA had limitations. Shelden explains: "In an airplane, a bolt is basically a bolt. But in architecture, a wall isn't just a wall. It has different behaviors. It is two lines on a piece of paper. It encloses a space. It represents a structure. It's a boundary in an energy model."

R and D for Buildings:: When Dennis Shelden looks at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, he sees traces of the technologies he helped develop.

One of the first challenges he tackled was to create software to make the "swoopy" shapes of a Seattle museum design buildable. Shelden created software that rendered curved surface models into organizations of panels that took into account the structural and support requirements imposed on the glass, aluminum, and stainless steel elements of the complex design. Another project he worked on at the time involved using software to analyze the constraints of certain building materials to extend the possible. For example, after designers determined how much a panel of glass could bend without breaking, they found that curved glass surfaces could be built without forming special panes of glass, as long as the curvature was limited.

Coping with these problems at Gehry's firm enhanced the technical tools at hand, tools that became a boon when the Disney effort was relaunched in 1998. Today, when he looks at the stunning structure, completed last year, Shelden sees the traces in the building forms of the technologies he helped develop.

Shelden's career path resembles a Gehry building—it is hard to find a straight line anywhere. Like many 30-something engineers today, he got his hands on computers as a preteen and programmed for fun throughout his adolescence. Meanwhile, he shuttled around the world as his parents' job assignments changed—his father was a technical specialist in chemical engineering for the United Nations, his mother worked for Swissair. Regularly, though, his family would vacation in Boston, and every time they drove past the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), they would point it out to him as a mecca.

So when the time came for college, the place to go was obvious. "I felt like a salmon going upstream when I got to Cambridge," he recalls. He had initially planned to be a computer science major, but he spent his last year of high school near Stuttgart, Germany, as an exchange student, and suddenly, the computer profession seemed stifling. Instead, he entered college as a double major in physics and philosophy, but quickly found out he was good in neither field.

Eventually he graduated with a B.S. in art and design in architecture, worked briefly as an architect, then as a carpenter, and then, falling back on the computer-aided design (CAD) courses he had taken at MIT, as a CAD consultant. He then joined a start-up in California that was developing technology to do energy system simulations for buildings. Working on the user interfaces, he programmed them in Smalltalk.

Meanwhile, he took engineering courses at the University of California at Berkeley as an extension student. In 1994 the CAD company failed, and Shelden went back to MIT, getting a master's degree in information technology and, later, a Ph.D. in computation. While he was at MIT, he worked on a project backed by Gehry Partners on collaborative design, intended to facilitate joint work by engineers and architects, and the firm offered Shelden a job, which he took in 1997.

Now, Shelden and the growing group of EEs and computer professionals at Gehry are taking their technology out from behind the scenes. They've spun off a company, Gehry Technologies LLC, in Los Angeles, to develop and market their tools to other architects. Shelden is chief technology officer of the new venture, which expects to have its first products out by midyear. "As part of an architecture firm, we were behaving an awful lot like a technology firm," Shelden says. The group's Holy Grail is to convert the industry at every level to these new design tools, to the point that the archaic but still ubiquitous paper blueprints will be a thing of the past.

Today, Shelden explains, an architect's vision is first realized as a drawing on paper; that paper is interpreted by engineers and then again by builders. "Potentially," he says, "we could compress that to the point where an architect can directly affect the making of things." And that, he adds, gazing out over a forest of architectural models, would be radical.

—Tekla S. Perry

By Photo: Henry Blackham