Elena Rossi is a facade and architectural engineer who works at the boundary where the building skin meets its structure - a boundary she insists is not a battleground but the most interesting room in the building. Trained in both architecture and structural engineering in Milan, she has always been drawn to the projects that refuse to keep the two disciplines apart: long-span roofs, glazed atria, gridshells, and the daylighting strategies that quietly drive their geometry long before any beam is sized.
She came to engineering through architecture, not the other way around, and she regards that as her great advantage rather than a gap to be apologised for. In her first studio she watched a beautiful competition scheme collapse under the weight of a structure bolted on as an afterthought, and she resolved never to let force and form be treated as separate conversations. She went back to study structures specifically so she could hold both halves of the design in one head at the same time.
At Foster + Partners she helps translate ambitious architectural ideas into systems that can actually be supported, sealed, drained and built, negotiating the constant three-way tension between transparency, thermal performance and the load path. It is work that demands fluency in two languages at once - the architect's vocabulary of light, proportion and intent, and the engineer's vocabulary of stress, deflection and movement joints - and Elena has built her career on being the person in the room who speaks both without an accent.
She is convinced that the most elegant buildings are the ones where the structure and the design intent tell exactly the same story, with nothing hidden behind a ceiling and nothing wasted in a member that exists only to cover a mistake. A facade, she likes to remind people, is a structural problem long before it is a cladding problem: it carries wind, it moves with temperature, it fights gravity over spans that would frighten most engineers, and it does all of this while pretending to be weightless.
Elena writes for CivilAxis to bring architects and engineers literally onto the same page. Her pieces explore how form follows force, how a roof can be made to span further by listening to the architecture rather than overruling it, and how thinking about daylight at concept stage makes a building both more beautiful and more efficient. She writes for the architect who fears the engineer will flatten their idea, and for the engineer who suspects the architecture is just decoration - and she tries, every time, to show each of them that they are wrong about the other.
Away from the drawing board she teaches a facade-engineering module at her old university in Milan and lectures occasionally on the history of long-span structures, a subject she loves with an unembarrassed romanticism. She is happiest in a half-finished atrium at the hour when the light is doing something the model never predicted, quietly taking photographs that will end up, sooner or later, in one of her articles.