KS Engineers: Expanding Horizons Meeting Needs

With a clientele as diverse as the company itself, KS Engineers provides engineering consulting and construction services for a variety of public and privately-owned projects.

When Newark-based KS Engineers, P.C. was awarded the historic Navy Yard redevelopment project, the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation (PIDC), which oversaw the project, had one question: how were they going to manage a project in Philadelphia from New Jersey? The answer: they wouldn’t. 
“Whereupon I came home and told Kamal [Shahid, PE, president of KS Engineers], ‘Well, we got the job, but we need to open an office in Philadelphia,’” recalls project manager Bob Busek, PE, LEED AP. “So we opened an office almost overnight.”
Their ambition paid off; KS Engineers’ Philadelphia branch grew quickly, and PIDC was so pleased with their work that they enlisted their help with other projects throughout the city. A fast-paced style keeps KS Engineers a step ahead of the competition, say Busek and Shahid, and it’s that attitude that enabled Shahid to build the company from two employees when it was founded in 1991 to nearly 200 today.
Of that 200, about 60 percent are women and minorities says VP of business development Eileen Della Volle. The PIDC contract was the largest to be awarded to a minority-owned business, and the company prides themselves on employing highly qualified engineers, regardless of gender or ethnicity. They are encouraged to enrich their work by getting involved in the community and staying up to date with the latest developments in the engineering industry. The company’s offices in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia work together to take advantage of all of the expertise and technological resources available to them. Their clientele is as diverse as the company itself; KS Engineers provides engineering, consulting, surveying, and construction services for a variety of public and privately owned projects.
 “Staying on the cutting-edge of the engineering business gives us the ability to present technologically advanced solutions and the most recent developments in today’s research to our clients,” Shahid says.
KS Engineers uses technology like robotic surveying and 3-D imaging tools to measure existing conditions and the potential impact of development on building sites. These very modern tools are increasingly being employed in projects involving adaptive reuse and renovation of historic buildings.
“Old building shells which would normally be torn down are being looked at in terms of renovation, both interior and exterior, to bring them up to date and use them for current-day uses, whether it be residential or commercial,” says KS Engineers’ civil department manager Bob Nash, PE, PP, CME, LEED Green Associate.
With environmental and cost concerns becoming increasingly significant, the government is offering incentives for adaptive reuse and sustainable building. “That becomes more of a challenge for our firm, because when you’re trying to deal with a sewer system and a water distribution system that’s approaching a hundred years old, it’s a far more complex engineering issue than it is with just designing a new system,” Busek says.
The Navy Yard project posed a major challenge for KS Engineers to integrate the old and new.  As the prime engineering consultant for the streetscape, KS Engineers had a central role in converting the area from an outdated shipbuilding yard to a multi-use complex with residential and commercial space. KS Engineers also relied on their subconsultant Wells Appel to provide landscape architecture and site furnishing in keeping with the urban design of the site. 
The historic buildings had to be preserved even while streets and utilities were being demolished and replaced to fit modern environmental and safety standards. KS Engineers used sustainable innovations to minimize impact to the environment throughout the project; it was the first in the area to use water gardens and natural grass filters to help control the movement of water and erosion, practices that are now considered standard.
In another recent project, the new Center for Science and Technology at Kean University in New Jersey, KS Engineers continued to use innovative methods to satisfy the environmental and functional needs of the site. Nash, who served as the manager for that project, says that they had to configure the site to work with its surroundings, which included residential and commercial space, as well as a historic museum building from the 1700s that once hosted George Washington. They also were able to minimize the environmental impact by incorporating landscaped areas and creating a way to deliver water to the building’s geothermal system.
“That entails drilling very deep wells into the earth, about 300 feet, which draw water upwards and then circulates the water through heat exchangers in the building. Depending on the temperature, it will either heat or cool the building,” Nash explains. The building requires no artificial heating or cooling system, he says, “and it has significantly cut down on their carbon footprint because it reduces the amount of electricity that the building needs and the amount of fossil fuels burned to heat the building.” The center earned a LEED Silver certification.
The team at KS Engineers says that part of what makes them so successful is an acute awareness of how everything they do will affect their community and the planet. They continue to evolve with modern technology while looking to the past for the key to engineering a more sustainable lifestyle. CLT