David Mar S.E.
David Mar has a wealth of experience in designing innovative structural systems. He believes the key to successful projects is striving to create holistic designs that optimize the architectural program and structural performance while controlling construction costs. To these ends, his designs are often inventive and technically ingenious, at the forefront of high-performance seismic and sustainable design.
This approach was best made evident during David’s role as the technical director for FEMA P807: Guidelines for the Seismic Retrofit of Weak-Story Multi-unit Wood-Framed Structures. His out-of-the-box thinking resulted in a comprehensive design methodology that yields high- performance retrofits at a low-cost, thus solving one of structural engineering’s most vexing class of problems.
David was also tasked by FEMA to lead the development of the Graphic Dashboard as part of FEMA P-58 outreach to explain the performance-based seismic design to engineers and other stakeholders.
David received his undergraduate and master’s degrees from UC Berkeley. He has lectured at the engineering departments of UC Berkeley and Stanford University, and at the Lean Construction Institute. In 1998 David was honored with SEAONC’s H.J. Brunier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Structural Design for his retrofit design of San Francisco’s Pacific Place.
David is a licensed structural engineer and civil engineer in California.