Never Afraid of Engineering: How Speed School Prepared Chris Bird to Build a Monument 

By Michael Phillips

High above Chicago’s Jackson Park at 225 feet in the air, 103 words from one of the most consequential speeches of the Obama presidency stretch across the facade of the new Obama Presidential Center. The words are not painted or projected or etched. They are cast in concrete, structurally significant to the building, and engineered to last 500 years.

Chris Bird, a senior structural engineer at TYLin and a graduate of Speed School, helped make that happen.
Bird is part of the team behind one of the most ambitious deployments of architectural Ultra-High Performance Concrete (UHPC) ever attempted in North America. Each of the tower’s 39 facade panels stands 40 feet tall, weighs approximately 14,000 pounds, and holds 458 letters from President Barack Obama’s 2015 speech in Selma, Alabama, commemorating the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday.”

For Bird, it is the project of a lifetime. And the foundation for it was laid at Speed School. “The final product is a culmination of thousands of hours of work that you were and are doing as a student,” Bird said. “The rigorousness and depth of our engineering curriculum at Speed School was unique in its way to enable me to never be afraid of engineering again.”

Bird credits the sequence of engineering fundamentals courses that anchor the Speed School curriculum as some of the most formative experiences in his training to become a problem solver. “When you are faced with what feels like an insurmountable challenge, the best thing you can do personally is break it down into something small and go step by step,” he recalled. “That was something that I learned at Speed School that never left.”

His path to the Obama Presidential Center incidentally began at the Obama White House. In the spring of 2016, Bird landed a co-op placement at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, where his role centered on implementing the National Environmental Policy Act. The opportunity was made possible by Speed School’s co-op program and the Brown Fellows Program, which helped fund an internship that was at the time unpaid.

“I wouldn’t have been able to do it without both of those groups supporting me,” Bird said.

The experience was a clarifying one for him. Bird had been weighing a career in environmental law, but watching major infrastructure projects, like high-profile, nationally debated ones, move through federal environmental review changed his thinking. “I was witnessing, from the federal review side, the impact, both positive and negative, that engineering can have on people and places,” he says. “I learned that I did not want to be a lawyer and that I did want to be an engineer. This is the type of large-scale impact I wanted to have.”

Nearly a decade later, that conviction led him to one of the most technically unprecedented projects of his career. The OPC facade panels had to be solid concrete instead of a steel structure with a concrete exterior or a lighter-weight alternative. The architects wanted the material itself to carry the message. What further compounded the challenge was that the speech could not be altered.

“Normally we can approach these types of sculptural projects with a little bit more flexibility,” Bird explained. “This one was relatively rigid in the sense that obviously you can’t change any letters. It’s a speech.”

The engineering solution required custom-built analysis scripts, a year-long production process, performance testing, and implementing UHPC, a relatively novel building material that Bird described as “the perfect combination between the durability of stone and the ductility of steel.”

When the panels finally went up, Bird was on-site. He watched the first panel lifted and then raced upstairs to meet it. “Seeing it installed was just a full, final moment where you see what goes from math and software into something that’s physical,” he said.

Then the building started speaking.

“When you start to see words get put on a building, it really does change the way it gets read and interpreted by the community,” Bird said. Typically, a structural engineer’s work disappears into the architecture it supports. This was the inverse. At the opening, Bird watched people approach the tower and stop to smile, stare, and even cry in some cases.

“As someone who normally is hiding my work,” he said, “it feels very unique to celebrate it in that way.”

For Bird, the experience can also serve as an invitation to current Speed School students to find their own source of inspiration and to trust the education they are receiving. “It’s always good to find inspiration in your profession, whether it is a project, an idea, a material science, or something like that, because that keeps that light alive inside of you,” he said.

“In my heart,” he reflected, “I’m still a Speed School student, applying mathematics, applying physics in a way that never left me.”