Firm's solid structures earn two awards for excellence.

The international engineering firm of Weidlinger Associates received two awards from the American Council of Engineering Companies of New York (ACEC New York) for engineering excellence in the Structural Systems category.

The first award was in recognition of the firm's work on the Smith College Campus Center in Northampton, Massachusetts.

The 56,000-s/f building is the first student center for the campus; it is a vibrant extracurricular stage set consisting of three independent buildings connected with seismically-safe bridges to a sun-dappled S-shaped atrium spine. Lightweight support for the snowstorm-protected skylight, accomplished with floating hybrid trusses, was the major engineering challenge, along with a blast-resistant curved wall that swerves around a nearby transformer station to enlarge the building's footprint. The Center is distinguished by its numerous curved and welcoming roofs, walls, stairways, rooms and Olmsted-inspired corridors.

The second award recognizes Weidlinger's work on the Staten Island September 11th Memorial, which occupies a waterfront site next to the Staten Island Yankee's Richmond County Bank Ballpark. The "Postcards" memorial by Masayuki Sono, honoring Staten Islanders who died in both World Trade Center terrorist attacks, consists of two mirror-image 38.5-foot-high walls with bent corners that tilt nine degrees away from each other, framing the view axis to the Towers' site. Eye-level white granite plaques that line the interior walls and identify 295 persons with profiles and text are backlit through vertical slots in the walls.

As the first significant 9/11 memorial to be built in the city, "Postcards" was in the public eye, completed within an almost impossible time frame and of an economical composite material that is more commonly used to build racing boats.