Charles H. Thornton, PhD, PE, Hon. AIA

by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Dr. Charles H. Thornton, PhD, PE, Hon. AIA, is a founding principal of Thornton Tomasetti and founder and chairman of the ACE (Architecture, Construction, Engineering) Mentor program, a program that partners high school students with AEC professionals to help promote interest in the design and construction professions. In recognition of his work, the National Building Museum recently awarded Dr. Thornton its Henry C. Turner Prize for Innovation in Construction Technology.

Education
My education is a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, Manhattan College, 1961; master’s degree in structural engineering, NYU, 1963; and PhD in structural mechanics, NYU, 1966.

Why did you become an engineer?
My father was a builder, a bricklayer, electrician, building inspector. When he retired, he was chief inspector of the New York City building department in the Bronx. He instilled in me the fact that the engineers were the smart guys on the job. Obviously, the architects are too. The professionals on the job are the ones who really make all the decisions on the design and then oversee the construction. The nice thing about being an architect or an engineer is that you have the choice of working in a design firm, for a construction company, or you can work for an owner. The opportunities are really pretty broad. I opted to go with a design firm, a structural engineering firm, and that’s where I stayed.

Who have been role models for you?
My parents, obviously; my father on the technical side. My mother was fantastic. She passed away June 21, 2007 at 91. Just a very nurturing family. Two brothers: the older brother has a PhD in structural engineering from Case in Cleveland, and the younger one decided to goof off and got drafted, but has worked for AT&T and Lucent and basically installs huge complicated telephone switching equipment.

And then the faculty, the really great teachers. In general, there are only a few of them. Most of the teachers you have are very unmemorable, but there are always a couple in high school, in college, in graduate school. And then, the founder of the company: Lev Zetlin was a pretty charismatic guy. He had a PhD from Cornell in structural engineering, so if he had one I had to have one. He left the firm in ’74, and Tomasetti and I bought it back from the company he sold it to in ’77, and that’s when it became Thornton Tomasetti.

Why did you found the ACE Mentor program?
The dean of engineering at Manhattan College called the board of consultants, of which I was a member, sometime in ’91 or ’92 and reported that the engineering enrollment in the private colleges and universities in the Northeast was plummeting. Manhattan College has always relied on the feeder high schools in the boroughs of New York City to supply students, typically white and male, to come to engineering school, and the reality was that most of the feeder high schools were now very diverse. The faculty had lost sight of the fact that engineering was a great place to go to school and make a living, and the dean said if we don’t do something to bring minorities and women into engineering, we’re going to have a problem.

A bunch of us—including Ray Monti, the chief engineer of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; Steve Greenfield, chairman emeritus of Parsons Brinckerhoff; John Magliano, with Syska and Hennessey; an architect named Lou Switzer; Ed Rytter, the facilities management vice president from Chase Manhattan; and Robert Borton, with Lehrer McGovern and Bovis—we all got together and decided to form a program and go into New York City high schools to find minorities and women.

We got a shot in the arm because there were 350 mostly minority kids (half women, half men) at the New York School Construction Authority Summer Intern program who had expressed an interest in the construction industry. They were all placed at companies. It was great because number one, they were really motivated kids. Number two, they were paid by the school construction authority. They came to the architect, engineering, and construction companies four days a week, and on the fifth day, they went back and got debriefed. If we didn’t have them doing meaningful stuff—I’m exaggerating, but if we had them all washing the floors—they’d never send them back to us. They’d send them to a company that was going to get them involved.

We got no help from New York City Public Schools. They didn’t even want to know we existed. Then I realized that there was one guidance counselor for every 1,000 students, so obviously no one was giving guidance to these kids. No one was telling them about architecture, construction, and engineering as a career path. ACE just took off. In New York, there was one team of companies mentoring 20 kids. The next year, we had three teams of three companies mentoring 60 kids. Last year, they started with 750 kids in New York City, I think in 25 teams. We expanded to Garden City, Yonkers, and Staten Island.

When did you grow nationally?
A very interesting thing happened in 2000. We were in New York City; Stamford, Conn.; Newark, N.J.; and maybe a couple of other cities in Connecticut. I was chatting with Engineering News Record and asked: “Why don’t you do a nice story about ACE?” They said: If you take it really national, we’ll give you great coverage.” That’s when we took off and opened in Chicago, five or six cities in Connecticut, and Dallas. In 2001, they put me on the cover of Engineering News Record as the Award of Excellence winner. Then Norbert Young [FAIA], president of McGraw-Hill Construction, agreed to come on board as vice chairman. McGraw-Hill has been fabulous, and once you start to get traction with people of the stature of Norbert Young, other luminaries in the industry start to join, and the more powerful your board is, the more traction and recognition you get. So that’s what happened.

How does the program work?
It’s structured to follow exactly the sequence of a project, so what do we do first? We have planners, architects, site planners, and civil engineers talk about how to start. Maybe the owner’s in there and asking how we’re going to build this building. How do you get money? How do you get a mortgage? How do you get a construction loan? After the planning, you start moving into the adjacencies and it’s the kids who select the project. A lot of them do recreational centers and sports facilities—building types they relate to. What’s really great—and I’ve seen it in all the cities I’ve mentored, including now Easton and St. Michaels, Md.—is that the kids are telling the mayor, the department of parks and recreation, and the school board what’s wrong with the facilities that are presently available. ACE legitimizes their ability to do that. It’s not sour grapes. They’ve gotten advice from 10 or 15 professionals over the 15 weeks, but in most cases, the work product is all the students’.

Last year, the mayor of Easton was in the audience at our final presentation breakfast at the Elks Club, and he said to this one team: “I really like your design. I think it’s well thought out. Every Tuesday we have the town council. Would you come and present your project to the council?” They did, and I was there. They were fabulous! The team that did this project captured the essence of what that neighborhood needed, and the mayor said to the council: “Why don’t we build one of these?”

I always tell people that you go to the first meeting, and these kids are looking at you and they’re trying to figure out: “I wonder where the dude got that tie.” And I look at them, and under my breath I say: “I don’t understand how these boys can keep their pants up.” There’s this cultural wall between the mentor team and the student team—and you just watch it melt week after week. It starts melting and they start getting engaged and motivated and they start talking.

How many students have completed the ACE mentor program?
We think about 40,000. We’re in 134 locations now.

What year(s) do they complete the program in high school?
We have freshmen who stay four years. We have sophomores who stay three years. A lot of the programs will give sophomores a small scholarship, juniors a slightly larger scholarship, and they bank it. They hold it for them. It’s an incentive for the kids to come back. Let’s assume that as a freshman they get a thousand bucks, as a sophomore they get a thousand bucks, as a junior they get two thousand bucks, and as a senior they get three or four thousand bucks. A lot of them go on to two-year community colleges, and a couple thousand bucks will pay the whole freight.

Are you tracking how many ACE alumni work in the AEC professions after completing their education?
Consistently 80-82 percent of our students go on to some form of higher education. We have 6,000 kids in the database right now whom we’re tracking. We have formed the first ACE alumni association, and the New York ACE affiliate had a fabulous session at the Renzo Piano New York Times headquarters on September 11. They introduced the board of the New York ACE alumni, and I knew all of them. They were all recruited about 8, 9, 10 years ago, and they’re all working for firms in New York. We intend to find them all. You need money and staff to track your graduates, and within a year we will have a very strong assessment statement of exactly how well the program’s working.

How do you plan to continue growing the organization?
Back in the ‘70s, Thornton Tomasetti had five offices, and we contracted intentionally when we bought the company. We closed all our branches and focused on the core. In ’93, we came back out and opened an office in Chicago. In ’94, we did Connecticut. In ’98, we did Dallas, and now there are 14 or 15 offices around the world, including Moscow, Shanghai, London, Hong Kong, and Abu Dhabi. When I was chair of the company from 1993 to 2005, everywhere I acquired an office we launched ACE on a parallel track. I knew it would go national, but having taken a long time to grow Thornton Tomasetti, I recognized that it takes a long time to grow these things. I’d say we’re on a geometric progression now. Peter Davoren and the rest of the board have said that 10,000 ACE students is just not going to solve the problem, so our strategic plan calls for 100,000 students per year sometime in the next three to five years. And we can do that.

What advice would you offer for would-be mentors?
Be yourself. It really doesn’t require a lot of preparation to do a mentoring session if you be yourself. Kids want to know who you are. They want to know where you came from. They want to know the challenges that you went through from high school to college to a career. They love anecdotal war stories. They love to hear circuitous, non-continuous career paths from people who are now 30 or 40, or whatever. If you talk about what you do every day, and if you talk about it with a passion, you’re a good mentor.

The toughest thing about mentoring is that you need to be exciting. You need to be entertaining. If you’re boring, you’re going to lose the kids. I’ve been teaching since 1966, and anybody who’s a teacher who doesn’t think they have to be an entertainer is not a good teacher. The old school is reading, writing and arithmetic, and the students just should be attentive. Well, that’s not the way it is today. Mentoring is actually quite easy if you are involved in day-to-day activities of all the aspects of the construction industry. If you’ve got an architect in the room and a structural engineer and a mechanical engineer and a construction manager and 18-25 kids, all you need to do is talk about what you do every day of your career.