Paul Haller Structural Design Award

The Haller Award is given to an individual engineer or an engineering firm that has enhanced the knowledge of masonry in practice. This award recognizes the beauty, elegance, and economy of structural masonry projects. The Award may be presented yearly, although no award needs to be given in a year.

Deadline

Nominations are due by June 30th each year.

This award recognizes the beauty, elegance and economy of structural masonry . Examples of such enhancement include overcoming design challenges, identifying applications that incorporate the potential advantages of masonry, and detailing masonry so it is easy to construct. Nominees may be at any stage in their career. Nominations may be made posthumously.

Nominations will be evaluated based on the extent to which the nominee has enhanced the knowledge of masonry in practice. Nominees who are not selected will remain in the pool of nominees, without limit.

  • A plaque presented at The Masonry Society’s Annual Meeting
  • Complimentary one-year individual membership in TMS
  • An article about the winner(s), written by the Haller Award Committee, published in the TMS E-Newsletter and in other venues dedicated to structural engineering in general and to structural masonry in particular
  • An invitation to speak at a TMS Annual Meeting about their work
  • Complimentary listing in the TMS Consultant/Speaker Directory for one year

All Nominees will receive a letter from the Haller Award Committee acknowledging their nomination, recognizing the contributions that led to it, and informing them of the selection process. If the nominator is someone other than the nominee, the letter will identify the nominator.

Submit a Nomination

Professor Paul Haller was a dynamic engineer who helped revolutionize the design of structural masonry.  Haller was born on March 7, 1902 in Zurich, Switzerland. He was formally educated at the Federal Technical University in Zurich, graduating in 1924.

After graduation, Haller worked as a practicing design engineer for several years, and then he joined the Swiss Federal Laboratory for Materials and Research. While there, he conducted extensive testing on masonry walls because after the second World War, concrete and steel materials were scarce throughout Europe. During his career, he tested over 1600 brick masonry walls, and the data from those experiments were used in the design and construction of an 18-story load-bearing brick building that consisted of walls from 12 to 15 inches in thickness. Such tall, thin walls caused nothing less than a revolution in the structural use of masonry since for the first time, a rational design method for structural masonry became possible.

In 1949, Professor Haller joined the engineering faculty at his alma mater and he became a full professor in 1966. Professor Haller retired in 1967 to enter private practice as a forensic engineer. In 1987, he died at the age of 85.

Paul Haller

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