EERI’s Oral History Program has published the second volume in the new Interviews by Stanley Scott series, focusing on James L. Stratta (1920-1994).
Interviews by Stanley Scott: An EERI Oral History Collection preserves and shares the valuable unfinished work of Stanley Scott (1921-2002), a research political scientist at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Beginning in 1984, Scott conducted tape-recorded interviews with pioneers in the field of earthquake engineering, eventually gathering hundreds of hours of audio and thousands of pages of transcripts. Scott completed nine volumes in Connections: The EERI Oral History Series, and the EERI Oral History committee completed another eight volumes posthumously using Scott’s draft manuscripts, notes, and interview transcripts. This new series makes available interviews that Scott was unable to finalize and publish during his lifetime.
James (Jim) L. Stratta was a California-based structural engineer and an expert on earthquake resistant structural design. Born in Berkeley and raised in San Francisco, he earned his B.S. Civil Engineering at University of California, Berkeley. During World War II he worked for the Ames Aeronautical Laboratory at Moffett Field. He then worked at Hall and Pregnoff, where he met Albert Simpson, with whom he founded Simpson, Stratta and Associates in 1952. The firm designed large-scale office parks, commercial buildings, and industrial facilities, including the original Intel building and a new headquarters for the National Semiconductor Company in Santa Clara, and was responsible for the design of a master plan for the City of Folsom in 1964. Stratta was also an adjunct professor at the UC Berkeley School of Architecture in the 1950s, and served as president of the Structural Engineers Association of Northern California. He participated in EERI’s post-earthquake reconnaissance programs, including site visits to, the Philippines in 1968 and 1976, Italy 1976 and 1980, Livermore 1980, and Coalinga 1984. He also had a career as a consulting forensic engineer.
Scott interviewed Stratta several times in 1991, but the planned oral history volume was not completed due to Stratta’s illness and death in 1994. From 2001 to 2003, Robert Preece, a friend and former employee of Simpson & Stratta, worked with Scott to edit the interview transcripts into manuscript form. This draft was subsequently edited and arranged for publication in this series by Thalia Anagnos and Charles Scawthorn. The volume covers Stratta’s early life and education, his experiences during World War II, his long career as an practicing structural engineer and forensic engineering expert, and his involvement with EERI and other engineering organizations, including the Structural Engineers Association and the Applied Technology Council.
Download the PDF of James L. Stratta from the EERI Digital Library here.
