Anthony James Fitzpatrick

FREng Fellowship of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) is an award and fellowship for engineers who are recognised by the Royal Academy of Engineering as being the best and brightest engineers, inventors and technologists in the UK and from arou ...

HonFRIBA (9 June 1951 – 26 July 2003) was an English-born American

structural engineer Structural engineers analyze, design, plan, and research List of structural elements, structural components and structural systems to achieve design goals and ensure the safety and comfort of users or occupants. Their work takes account mainly of ...

who was director of the

Arup Group Arup Group Limited, trading as Arup, is a British multinational professional services firm headquartered in London that provides design, engineering, architecture, planning, and advisory services across every aspect of the built environment. ...

Life and career

Born on 9 June 1951, in

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

, he graduated from

Leeds University The University of Leeds is a public research university in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It was established in 1874 as the Yorkshire College of Science. In 1884, it merged with the Leeds School of Medicine (established 1831) and was renamed ...

in 1972 with a first class degree in

civil engineering Civil engineering is a regulation and licensure in engineering, professional engineering discipline that deals with the design, construction, and maintenance of the physical and naturally built environment, including public works such as roads ...

, having won the Holst Prize. He worked for Arup in the UK and in Iran, before joining the design team for the new

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit li ...

St Pancras Station St Pancras railway station (), officially known since 2007 as London St Pancras International, is a major central London railway terminus on Euston Road in the London Borough of Camden. It is the terminus for Eurostar services from Belgium, F ...

in 1978. In 1982, he relocated to

Hong Kong Hong Kong)., Legally Hong Kong, China in international treaties and organizations. is a special administrative region of China. With 7.5 million residents in a territory, Hong Kong is the fourth most densely populated region in the wor ...

where he worked on the Hong Kong Bank headquarters, the Shanghai Hilton and Century Tower in

Tokyo Tokyo, officially the Tokyo Metropolis, is the capital of Japan, capital and List of cities in Japan, most populous city in Japan. With a population of over 14 million in the city proper in 2023, it is List of largest cities, one of the most ...

. In 1987, when he returned to

, he was made a director of Arup. He later became a board member of the global Partnership and chairman of the Building Engineering Board. In 2001, he became chairman of Arup’s Americas Division. While in London, he worked on the designs for the new

Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery in London, housing the United Kingdom's national collection of international Modern art, modern and contemporary art (created from or after 1900). It forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Live ...

and

30 St Mary Axe 30 St Mary Axe, previously known as the Swiss Re Building, is a commercial skyscraper in London's primary financial district, the City of London. Its nickname, The Gherkin, is due to its resemblance to the vegetable. It was completed in Decem ...

as well as the * Shard of Glass,

London Bridge The name "London Bridge" refers to several historic crossings that have spanned the River Thames between the City of London and Southwark in central London since Roman Britain, Roman times. The current crossing, which opened to traffic in 197 ...

Fitzpatrick took over the Millennium Bridge design following its opening when it was found that it wobbled. He designed the measures to correct the wobble, including

tuned mass dampers A tuned mass damper (TMD), also known as a harmonic absorber or seismic damper, is a device mounted in structures to reduce mechanical vibrations, consisting of a mass mounted on one or more damped springs. Its oscillation frequency is tune ...

and viscous dampers. In 2003, while working on the design for

Heathrow Heathrow Airport , also colloquially known as London Heathrow Airport and named ''London Airport'' until 1966, is the primary and largest international airport serving London, the capital and most populous city of England and the United Kingdo ...

's Terminal 5, Tony Fitzpatrick was killed in a road accident when his bicycle flipped, throwing him under a passing truck."Tony Fitzpatrick"
''theguardian.com'', 8 August 2003. Retrieved 2015-01-13.

Unfinished projects

A number of Tony Fitzpatrick's design have not yet been built. They include: *

Tour Sans Fins The Tour Sans Fins (“Endless Tower”) was a tower planned in La Défense that has since been cancelled. The spelling ''Tour Sans Fins'' may, to a native French-speaker, sound like a grammatical mistake as it would normally be written ''Tour Sa ...

La Défense La Défense () is a major business district in France's Paris metropolitan area, west of the city limits. It is located in Île-de-France region's Departments of France, department of Hauts-de-Seine in the Communes of France, communes of Courbe ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Fitzpatrick, Anthony James British structural engineers 1951 births 2003 deaths Fellows of the Royal Academy of Engineering Fellows of the Royal Institute of British Architects