Engineers / John H. Hom
Source: SOHA Engineers
Source: SOHA Engineers
Source: Darrick Hom
Source: Darrick Hom
“If I have done my job correctly, then you will never see the work I do.” John Hom, on shoring and underpinning design.
“I flunked my first college class in soil mechanics. My professor took me aside and told me I could make a living working in the soils field.” John Hom, personal quote.
“I wished I had invented a Hom’s Law with regard to shoring and underpinning. Then it would go alongside Ohm’s Law and Mho’s Law.” John Hom, personal quote.
John H. Hom was born in 1932 in Guangzhou, China. He immigrated to the United States in 1953, where he graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1957. After a brief service in the United States Army, John began working for John Sardis & Associates in 1961. He eventually left the company and joined Daniel Shapiro and Harry Okino in 1970 to establish SOHA Engineers.
John established himself as one of the best engineers specializing in the field of shoring and underpinning design. Known unofficially as the “shoring king” and/or “the godfather of shoring,” John designed many of the more complicated shoring and underpinning construction projects in downtown San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles, encountering a variety of soil conditions and unusual situations with neighboring structures and underground utilities and infrastructure. He was known as a “contractor’s engineer,” being able to assess the situation in the field on the spot and provide unconventional yet practical “outside the box” solutions to implement. Shoring and underpinning projects included UC Berkeley Doe Library Annex, San Francisco Marriott, Moscone Convention Center, Parc 55 Hilton Hotel, and the 7th/8th Avenue Slope Stabilization Project in San Francisco. Other structures designed by John include the Foothill Housing Residential Complex at UC Berkeley and the Gateview Condominiums in Albany. John retired in 2003 after over forty years of service to the structural engineering profession.
- ASCE Fellow
- SEAONC Life Member
- John M. Sardis
- Daniel Shapiro
- Harry Okino
- Eugene Tuan
- Alan Robinson
- Darrick Hom