Engineering Success: David Cooper on the Future of the WSP Group

The next step, according to Mr. Cooper, who like many of WSP’s employees is LEED certified, is to focus on integrated design, or how a building functions through its collective systems. Evaluating the entire lifecycle of a building and managing the data flow of its processes will enable owners and developers to create value from their investments.

Such a focus on integrated design will play out with several of the towers currently rising at the World Trade Center complex, said Mr. Cooper.

WSP’s influence at the World Trade Center site has been widespread: their services have been utilized at Towers Two and Three, Seven World Trade Center and the Memorial. Like many WSP projects, Silverstein Properties’ Tower Two will seek to achieve LEED status through WSP’s consultancy, while at Seven World Trade Center, WSP helped to incorporate a 10-floor electrical substation that will service much of Lower Manhattan.

“We’ve always prided ourselves on having a diverse base of work, of market sector,” Mr. Cooper said. “We have deep expertise in each of the sectors that we work in.”

With expertise and experience stretching into some of New York’s latest and greatest sports arena developments, as well as a daily commute through Penn Station, Mr. Cooper offers unique insight into the debate over the future of Madison Square Garden. He admits that, while he would love to see Penn Station restored to its former glory, it will be difficult to do so with Madison Square Garden sitting above it.

“At the end of the day, I think it would be great for the city to have a grander Penn Station, with more dynamic development above it, and find a different home for Madison Square Garden and give Madison Square Garden a brand new arena,” he said, adding that a 10-to-15-year timeline for the process is feasible, politics aside.

Though, when asked for his professional opinion on the state of the arena, which many consider unappealing, Mr. Cooper clams up.

“I’m going to plead the Fifth,” he said with a smile. “It’s come a long way—I’ll put it that way.”

Mr. Cooper’s path to the top of WSP’s U.S. business has been, to use his words, “simple, really.”

Two years into a liberal arts degree at Tufts University, he decided he had had enough. His lifelong interest in math and science took control, and in defiance of his parent’s wishes that he receive a “well-rounded” education, he transferred into the school’s engineering program. He hasn’t looked back since.

As a student, Mr. Cooper worked for a state agency in energy conservation, which piqued his interest in thermodynamics and motivated him to pursue a career in the field.

Recruited as a summer intern in the energy group at Flack + Kurtz between his junior and senior years of college, Mr. Cooper, a Long Island native, has been with the engineering consultancy firm and its successor businesses for over 30 years. Named a partner in the business after 13 years of service, Mr. Cooper transitioned to WSP, the U.S. branch of a multinational business which acquired Flack + Kurtz in 2000.

Mr. Cooper’s time with Flack + Kurtz allowed him the opportunity to “look at the forest before studying the trees,” as he puts it.

“It gave me a holistic view of how systems work, how buildings work, energy performance,” he said. “I had a bigger picture view of energy dynamics and systems interactions before I knew how to plan a duct and select a diffuser and lay out a pipe.”

To put it simply, he was hooked.

“I fell in love with what the firm was doing and what I had a chance to do,“ Mr. Cooper said of his early career. “The rest is history.”