No Stopping

Retirement doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the horizon. Baker promised himself that he would work 32 hours a week last year and 24 hours this year, but he still is highly in demand. He gave a talk to geotech engineers in San Antonio in January, followed by supertall consulting work in South Korea and another talk in Dubai, with a few vacations in between. “I still like going to work,” Baker says. “People say to me, ‘Why aren’t you retired?’ I say, ‘I am retired.’”

Baker is starting to feel uncomfortable with all the attention he is getting. Has was elected to the National Academies in 2000. In 2006, the earth-savvy Moles bestowed Baker with its non-member award. Later this month, Baker will receive the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Opal Award along with Dionisio, who started out as a geotechnical engineer. Next year, Baker will give ASCE’s Terzaghi Lecture, named after the father of soil mechanics, Karl Terzaghi, who cast the science’s manifestoes in the pages of this magazine in the 1920s.

Chicago’s Groundbreaking Caissons
Bearing Pressure	Building	Floors	Year Built	Test Method
Hardpan (Chicago Building Code = 12 ksf)
30 ksf	Lake Point Tower	70	1963	Triaxial, hardpan core, in lab
40 ksf	Chicago Apparel Center	20	1977	Pressuremeter, in-situ
40 ksf	Chicago Mercantile	40	1987	Pressuremeter
	Exchange Towers
50 ksf	Lake Shore Plaza	38	1986	Pressuremeter
50 ksf	AT&T Corporate Center	60	1989	Pressuremeter
60 ksf	Chicago Title & Trust	50	1992	Pressuremeter
Top of Rock (CBC = Not Addressed)
50 tsf	Vue20 Condominiums	19	2003	Pressuremeter
75 tsf	McCormick Place West		2007	Pile load, Osterberg cell, in-situ
90 tsf	One Museum Park	62	2008	Osterberg cell
Rock Socketed (CBC = 200 tsf)
200 tsf	John Hancock Center	100	1969
200 tsf	AON Center	83	1973
200 tsf	Sears Tower	108	1974
230 tsf	UBS Tower	50	2001	Osterberg cell
250 tsf	Aqua at Lakeshore East	82	2009 (est.)	Osterberg cell
270 tsf	Trump International Hotel & Tower	96	2009 (est.)	Osterberg cell
300 tsf	Chicago Spire	150	2011 (est.)	Osterberg cell
Source: STS/AECOM, Emporis, City of Chicago Dept. of Buildings, ENR

Clyde Nelson Baker Jr. calls himself an accidental engineer, and to some degree, he is. Born in Flushing, N.Y., in 1930, he suffered from rheumatoid arthritis as a young man. At the urging of his father a surgeon who had wanted to be an engineer Baker tried several fields before settling on soils. He had a pilot’s license at 16, before he could legally drive a car. He received a physics degree at The College of William & Mary and went on to study electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His illness flared up, forcing him to drop out for a semester. After experimental cortisone treatment, Baker shifted into civil engineering and graduated with a master’s degree in 1954. He had been working in MIT’s Soils Stabilization Laboratory, taking classes offered by Terzaghi.

John Gnaedinger, who founded STS in 1948, discovered Baker in Washington, D.C., while giving a talk to the Highway Research Board on his thesis, which detailed an early use of radioactive isotopes as a technique to investigate soils. Gnaedinger, who died in 2001, asked Baker to come to Chicago in 1954, even though the company couldn’t really afford to hire. “John was the kind of person who would give you all the experience you wanted,” Baker recalls.

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Shelbourne Development Group Inc. Skyline from Spire site.

He married shortly afterward. Baker was set up in 1949 on a blind date on Long Island, where he met his future wife, Jeanette, a Quaker from Indianapolis who was visiting a girlfriend. “She’d have a Tom Collins with nothing in it,” says Baker. “I’d have my Tom Collins with something in it.” They danced together, but the two lost contact.

When Baker packed up his car and moved to Chicago, he looked her up for a Saturday-night date. She insisted on a Sunday-afternoon walk. They married in 1955, adopted three children, Mark, Lynn and Glenn. For his wife’s milestone birthdays, Baker writes a poem. He often refers to Jeanette as his “supportive partner” and “soul mate.”

Just about everyone in the Baker family has spent some time dishing the dirt in the STS soils lab. Mark Baker is STS’s chief driller, and Jeanette Baker calls herself the “Hydrometer Queen” for conducting 38 concurrent tests in one day, a company record that has lasted for years.

Pier Pressures

Baker’s first major assignment in deep foundations was at the Air Force Academy in Colorado. He has since worked on other infrastructure, but buildings became his...

... honors go to his head. Ego is not his temperament, colleagues say, and that helps him see others’ points of view. “The guy has an open mind,” says Manoher Chawla, a Chicago-based geotech engineer and the city’s foundation permitter. “[Clyde] is a very upbeat guy. At his age, he is not slowing down.” He drives fast and with a purpose, in a little Toyota Prius with an “OBAMA ’08” sticker cockeyed on the rear bumper.