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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
Adverti$er
July 2019 #11240 Page #56
Post Frame at a Crossroads Is This the 11th Hour for the Industry?
By Sharon Thatcher, Editor, Frame Building News This article appears in the June 2019 issue of Frame Building News. Reprinted with permission.
F
or several years, there has been a foreboding trend in the post-frame industry: the disappearance of post-frame engineers. At once a strong coalition of devoted proponents who worked diligently on both personal and professional time to promote the industry through research, education and builder support, they are now ‘graying out’ at an alarming rate. It was bound to happen, but what many people did not see, was that most of these post-frame professionals were not being replaced. There has literally been no one left behind to continue the post-frame engineering journey. This trend is no more apparent than at the university level where wood construction is not being taught to prospective engineers. Frank E. Woeste, Ph.D., P.E., is one of those post-frame engineers who blazed a prominent trail before retiring from Virginia Tech in 2003. He was not replaced with a wood engineering specialist, a trend being seen nationwide.
The Early Years of the Industry Woeste explained that even in the boom years of post-frame’s popularity (arguably beginning in the 1950s and extending into the 1990s), universities struggled to incorporate wood construction of any kind into its engineering curriculum. “If you go back to when I first started, very few civil engineering departments offered a wood design class,” he said. “It was the purview of agricultural engineers, because historically farm buildings were wood frame.” Some professors discovered post frame and embraced it. Woeste was one of them. Donald A. Bender, Ph.D., P.E., now at Washington State University, was another. Noted Bender: “Back then (in the 1970s) most university agricultural engineering departments had a faculty member for wood structures: post frame and animal confinement types of construction,” he said. “And at most universities the faculty was a one-off person. At Virginia Tech it was Frank Woeste, at Texas A&M, where I was and now at Washington State, it was myself, at Wisconsin University it was Dave Bohnhoff, at South Dakota State it was Gary Anderson, at Penn State it was Harvey Manbeck, and at Cornell it was Kifle Gebremedhin.” It worked because agricultural engineering programs at the university level were still prevalent and post-frame was seen as a revolutionary style of construction that universities could find potential in promoting. Continued next page
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