Daniel Murphy combines technical expertise with relationship building.

Approach the U’s McNamara Alumni Center and you’re likely to wonder what sort of a building it could be. Like a huge tent drawn taut over invisible poles and slashed with startling triangular windows, it thrusts out from a more conventional dark-brown, oblong office building. Enter the Geode, as the angular structure has been nicknamed, and you’ll probably be awed by the way sunlight pours in from those daring windows, illuminating a vast space that feels like geometry turned into opera.

And for the fact that this awe-inspiring, beautifully daring building doesn’t come crashing down on you, you can thank Daniel Murphy (B.C.E.’ 74) and his team.

Murphy was the lead structural engineer on the McNamara Center, so it was up to him and his colleagues to turn this frankly visionary structure by the New Mexico-based architect Antoine Predock into a building that would stand the physical stresses of its own uniqueness, plus the pressures of wind, weather, and time. And to do it all within budget, on time, and according to complex building codes.

The center is just one of the many buildings that Murphy has had a major role in planning and guiding as they rose up from the earth. He’s the former CEO and current senior principal at the Minneapolis-based Meyer Borgman Johnson engineering firm.

MBJ has supplied its structural expertise to dozens of other construction and renovation projects at the U, including the Weisman Art Museum, Masonic Children’s Hospital, Coffman Union, the Physics and Nanotechnology Building, and Northrop Auditorium. Further afield, MBJ designed the structural renovations of Orchestra Hall and Westminster Church in downtown Minneapolis.

Projects beyond the Twin Cities include the Heikkila Chemistry and Swenson Science Buildings at UMD; the Mayo Clinic’s Kellen medical-research building, the Stanley Museum of Art at the University of Iowa; the Central Station transit hub in downtown Phoenix, the Maricopa County Southeast Justice Center in Mesa, Arizona; and many more, including renovation of an historic Marine Corps barracks in Washington, D.C.

The fact that MBJ’s footprint has spread across the country is largely down to Murphy’s initiative.

Drawn toward engineering early, the San Francisco native spent a high school summer as an intern with a firm in the Bay Area, then enrolled in the U’s civil engineering program after his family moved to Minnesota. “After graduation I met with two or three general contractors and a couple of design firms here and in Detroit,” he recalls. “I also had an interview with Minnesota Department of Transportation thinking about bridge engineering. And then I found MBJ, and I really liked those guys.

“There were about seven or eight people there at the time, with a growing practice, and I just liked the freedom, the personality, and the reputation they had,” he says.

After becoming a principal and vice president in 1982, however, Murphy decided that he wanted to, as he put it, “change the culture” of MBJ. He pushed to add a satellite office in Duluth, and others followed: Phoenix and Rochester, Minnesota; then Chicago and San Francisco. MBJ even cofounded a firm in the Philippines that provides IT services to structural engineering projects in the U.S.

“I wanted to grow the firm,” Murphy says. “Growth is important for a business. A business that’s growing is attractive, and that’s important from a morale perspective as you recruit. It’s also important from a resiliency perspective: As markets change, opportunities present themselves, jurisdictions change, code requirements change. I felt that our firm needed more ability to rebalance and adapt. Having multiple locations hits both ends of the spectrum, the recruiting side and the delivery side.”

Murphy’s combination of technical skill and managerial savvy is very much his own. But it’s also a necessary part of the job as he sees it.

For people outside the profession, it’s tempting to think of structural engineers as wizards who run numbers to draft plans—and there’s truth to that image. “If I asked 200 engineers what got them interested in engineering,” he says, “I bet 9 out of 10 of them would say, ‘I love math.’ And we need people who are strong technically, who can execute the work.”

On the other hand, he says, structural engineering is also a business that serves clients—mainly architectural firms, but also general contractors, fabricators, property developers and owners, city jurisdictions, and others.

“I’ve always wanted to make sure that we pay attention to the client’s enterprise, too,” Murphy says. “How can we help it be successful? Maybe by introducing it to relationships, helping it to manage risk, negotiating fees collaboratively. It’s about doing a good job on a structural engineering engagement, but also investing in relationship-building at the C-suite level.”

Murphy learned relationship-building, and a lot more, from his main mentor, MBJ cofounder John Meyer (B.C.E. ’47). Just attending meetings and listening to Meyer, he says, was an education.

“In a typical client consulting meeting, for example, we talked about how our structural engineering systems were going to support the vision of the architect,” Murphy recalls. “John could share his vision for what that outcome looked like, help people understand what we were doing, give them an update on our progress. It was a whole process of engagement at a granular level, and it was so powerful for me to listen to, to see how he interacted with clients, how he problem-solved.”

In fact, says Murphy, the essence of his business is problem-solving. And given the breadth and complexity of the profession, and the problems involved in creating massive structures that resist gravity while functioning optimally, structural engineering is a cooperative discipline in which teamwork and mentoring are key.

“Even engineers 10 or 12 years into their careers may need to call on the technical experience of someone with 30 years,” he says. “I actually can’t imagine being a structural engineer by myself.” MBJ has institutionalized this by providing every single engineer outside of the C-suite—not just newbies—with a formal mentor.

What mentorship, colleagueship, and experience pass on, he says with emphasis, is the kind of professional judgment that you can’t learn even in the best engineering school. “The real world presents something that’s quite different than the academic experience,” Murphy says. “It’s those real-world problem-solving cases that are successful, and even those that are not, that build a body of experience that an engineer relies on every day—whether the experience was yesterday or 30 years ago. Some of the things I learned in the ’80s, they’re with me like it was yesterday.”

A favorite piece of counseling from when he was a fledgling engineer came from a senior partner: He told me, ‘It’s not that you’re not going to make mistakes. It’s how gracefully you extricate yourself.’”

Today Murphy has scaled down his activities with the firm, but he still consults, advises, and occasionally works with clients. And he still loves the profession.

“I love seeing young engineers develop and take on responsibility to navigate risky situations, even to fail and then recover. I love to see that development,” Murphy says.

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