Talk title: "Buildings Move, Buildings Leak: Revisiting the Critical Link Between Engineering Mechanics and Enclosure Performance"
Jon Porter is a structural engineer whose work focuses on the intersection of structural movement and building enclosure performance. In this talk from the Westford Symposium, he walks through a series of forensic case studies where unaccounted-for structural loads and material movement (thermal expansion, moisture-driven volume change, and long-term shrinkage) led straight to enclosure failures: a column that keeps cracking no matter how many times it's repaired, spontaneous tempered-glass breakage from nickel sulfide inclusions, an under-designed curtain wall joint, a stepped mass-timber facade, a chronically under-sloped roof, a miscommunicated steel stud change, and a failed plaza deck assembly. Jon uses each case to show how ignoring restraint, deflection limits, and material volume change during design and construction review sets enclosures up to fail years later.