Alexandra Teniuch, 28

Alexandra Teniuch woke up one morning to discover she no longer wanted to be a doctor. The idea of sticking people with needles and cutting them open gave her the heebie-jeebies. So she pivoted into the world of structural engineering, where she could focus her love of physics and calculus on creating extraordinary things.

“I had a really wonderful physics teacher in high school who pushed me my junior and senior years — when I was trying to figure out what would be the best career path for me given my skill set — to pursue engineering,” she said. “If you had told me at a very young age that I was going to be an engineer, I probably wouldn’t have thought so.”

But after graduating from Northeastern University in 2019, she joined DeSimone Consulting Engineering, where she has provided high-level structural analysis, drawing review, fabrication and coordination for some of the company’s most impressive projects. 

Those have included the Olympia residential tower in Dumbo, Brooklyn. Teniuch served as a key member of the structural design team for the building shaped like a billowing boat sail.   

“That was actually one of my first projects when I started at DeSimone,” she said. “The floor plates actually not only grow smaller as you go up the building, but it kind of twists to create that exterior profile going up like the bow of a ship.”

Managing the complex loads that came along with the Olympia’s curved form and step-and-turn profile was a challenge that required novel solutions. Tenuich worked with the structural team to supplement the traditional vertical column style with sloping columns that were positioned along the building’s height. This innovative approach balanced the divergent load distribution that was caused by the building’s shape, ensuring a structural stability that also met the architect’s original vision. 

“I like the relationship between architect and engineer,” she said. “I sometimes think that the architect pushes the envelope, which puts the engineer out of their comfort zone. But, then, that in tandem gives you a really beautiful end product.”