Engineers / Navinchandra R. Amin
Source: Navin Amin
Source: Navin Amin
Source: Navin Amin
Navinchandra (Navin) R Amin was born in 1941 in the village of Sarsa, Gujaret State, India. His father was in the farming profession and spent much of his time at the farm. In addition to farming, he was interested in the development and construction of housing complexes. Navin’s grandfather was a doctor.
Navin earned his Bachelor of Engineering in Civil Engineering from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India in 1961. He then went on to earn his Master of Structural Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, India in 1963 and a Master of Science in Civil Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Illinois in 1973.
Navin’s career as a Civil Engineer began in 1963 with the construction of a major steel plant in Bhilai, India. Navin worked with the contracting firm of Uttam Sing Duggal. All the construction design documents were done by Russian engineers and the construction was also supervised with a team of Russian engineers.
In 1965, Navin joined the consulting structural engineering firm of Mahendra Raj in Bombay, India. He was responsible for leading a group of Structural Engineers in the office of architect B.V. Doshi. His team provided structural engineering services on a housing complex, a water treatment plant, a water tower, and an office building for Gujarat State Fertilizer in Chhani, India.
In February of 1968, Navin moved to Chicago, Illinois with a student visa for further education and began in the masters program at Illinois Institute of Technology. B.V. Doshi gave him a recommendation to Walter Netsch, a partner in the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merril (SOM). Netsch introduced Navin to Fazlur R. Khan, the Structural Engineering partner at SOM. Navin was hired to work as a Structural Engineer during the summer of 1968 and continued to work at SOM during his studies and later as a full-time employee in 1973.
At SOM in Chicago, Navin worked on many significant projects including:
- 50-story One Shell Square Building, New Orleans
- 110 story Sears Tower, Chicago
- Arab International Bank, Cairo, Egypt
- New World Center, Hong Kong
- Hyatt Regency Bumi, Surabaya, Indonesia
- Grupo Alfa Headquarters, Monterrey, Mexico
In the fall of 1979, Navin moved to SOM’s San Francisco office to help lead the Structural Group. There, he met Stephen Johnston, an Associate Partner and the Head of the Structural Group. In December of 1980, this move was finalized when Navin moved to the SOM office in San Francisco to work on the China Foreign Trade Center in Beijing, China. Other significant projects Navin worked on during his time at the San Fransisco SOM office include:
- 5 Fremont Street, San Francisco, CA
- Crocker Center (twin tower complex), Los Angeles
- 345 California Center, San Francisco, CA
- 333 Bush Street mixed-use project, San Francisco, CA
- 388 Market mixed-use project, San Francisco, CA
- 505 Montgomery Street office building, San Francisco, CA
- Pacific Bell Complex, San Ramon, CA
- Lake Merrit Towers, Oakland, CA
- Bank of America Technology Center, Concord, CA
- Industrial Bank Building, Beijing, China
- Ninth District US Court of Appeals renovation/retrofit, San Francisco, CA
- New San Francisco International Terminal, SFO
In the early 1980s, Navin Amin was instrumental in supporting the experimental cyclic testing of pre-Northridge steel moment resisting frame beam-column assemblies not previously tested. The EERI Earthquake Spectra paper [Popov, Amin, et al, 1985] documents the experimental testing of the cyclic behavior of large beam-column assemblies illustrating the importance of the use of stiffeners and doubler plates in these moment frame connections.
From 1997 to 2010, Navin worked as a Principal at Middlebrook + Louie in San Francisco.
From 2010 to 2016, Navin worked as a Principal at Louie International. During that time, he worked on the following projects:
- Rehabilitation of 215 Fremont Street, San Francisco, CA
- GAP Headquarters, San Francisco, CA
- Rehabilitation of 690 Market Street, San Francisco, CA
- Rehabilitation of One Kearny Street, San Francisco, CA
- Macau Project, Macau
- New Doha International Airport, Doha, Qatar
Selected Papers/Publications:
- “Computerized Design of World’s Tallest Building” (Co-Author)
- “US Court of Appeals, Seismic Isolation Implementation” Presented at the Symposium of National Hazard Phenomena and Mitigation, ASME/SME/PVEP Conference
- “Effect of the Orientation of Principle Axis of Stiffness on the Dynamic Response of a Slender Square Building”, 1989 (Co-Author)
- “The Potential Role of Non-Linear Analysis in the Seismic Design of Building Structures”, 1990 (Co-Author)
- “Study of Base Uplift of Seismically Isolated Buildings”, 1995
- Popov, E.P., Amin, N.R., Louis, J. J. C., and Stephen, R. M. 1985. Cyclic Behavior of Large Beam-to-column Assemblies. Earthquake Spectra, EERI. 1 (2) 203-238.
- Stephen E. Johnston
- Fazlur R. Khan
- Hal Iyengar
- Myron Goldsmith
- Egor Popov
- John Zils
- Stan Korista
- Peter Lee
- Hamid Fatehi
- Anoop Mokha
- Neville Mathias
- King Le-Chang
- Vivian Wan
- Jason Louie
- Tom Lauck
- Skidmore Owings & Merrill
- Middlebrook + Louie
- Louis International
- Seismic Isolation
- Steel Moment Frame
- Tall Buildings