Diederik Veenendaal

Diederik Veenendaal is a building engineer interested in innovative and complex structural designs, as well as parametric modeling, computational optimization and sustainability. He received his Bachelor and Master degrees in Civil Engineering at the University of Technology in Delft (TU Delft), specializing in building engineering. He was a visiting student in 2006 at the Lousiana State University (LSU) Hurricane Center after hurricane Katrina, working on floating structures and buoyant foundations for historical buildings. He completed his Master's thesis in 2008 on the topic of evolutionary optimization of fabric formed beams, with assistance from prof. Mark West of the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada.

He started his professional career at Witteveen+Bos engineering consultants in the Netherlands, working on various types of structures and materials. Notable projects include groundfreezing calculations and safety analysis for the downtown subway stations of the North/South subway line in Amsterdam and the structural design for the largest tensioned membrane roof in the Netherlands, ice skating arena De Scheg in Deventer.

In 2010, Diederik Veenendaal started his doctoral research at the ETH, continuing his computational work on fabric formwork at the Institute of Technology in Architecture. His research will focus on strategies to integrate design, form-finding and analysis of fabric formed structural systems.

He also serves as editorial assistant for Professor Block's book Practical Form Finding and Structural Optimization of Shell Structures, co-edited with Prof. Sigrid Adriaenssens from Princeton University and Dr. Chris Williams from the University of Bath. Please contact Diederik for more questions on this upcoming book.