Cowboys Stadium wins top engineering award

HOUSTON –  Cowboys Stadium, engineered by Walter P Moore, won the prestigious 2010 “Eminent Conceptor" award, the highest award given by the Texas Council of Engineering Companies in its annual Engineering Excellence Awards program. The award was announced at the awards gala on April 9. The program, which began in 1975, recognizes organizations’ annual outstanding achievements within the engineering community.

A distinguished panel of judges from around the state selected 12 Gold Medal and 8 Silver Medal winning projects from a broad field based on uniqueness, originality, technical value to the engineering profession, complexity and how successfully the project met the needs of the client. Cowboys Stadium was the top winner in the category of “Structural Systems,” as well as the top project overall.

With this top award, Walter P Moore projects have now won a total of nine Eminent Conceptors—more than any other firm in state history.

The stadium also recently won another award, the 2009 Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement Award, presented by The Texas Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers, the oldest national engineering organization in the U.S. The award was presented on April 12 in Austin, Texas.

Walter P Moore served as lead structural engineer for the project. The monumental $1.15 billion, 80,000-seat, three million sq ft, retractable roof superstructure established at least three structural engineering world records. It is the longest single-span roof structure in the world; it boasts the largest center-hung HD video display board; and its operable glass doors are the world’s largest. Additionally, the roof’s mechanization system is the first application of a rack-and-pinion retractable roof drive system in North America and the largest and steepest such roof application in the world. And the field isn’t the only thing that’s green. Cowboys Stadium is a leading venue in environmental performance, incorporating numerous sustainable design initiatives.

Photo courtesy of Blake Marvin, HKS, Inc.