The Team
Rachel's love of design and curiosity about the built environment led her to structural engineering. Natural building piqued her interest during undergrad at Swarthmore College, where she researched earthbag building. She worked as a timber frame carpenter before earning her master's in structural engineering at UC Berkeley. Working with VSE, Rachel is relishing the opportunity to blend passion, applied building experience, and engineering knowledge to deliver exceptional construction detailing. Her past experience includes new construction, conceptual development of prefabricated structural systems, seismic retrofit of existing buildings, and sculptural support and exhibit design.
Beyond work, Rachel enjoys biking around the beautiful Bay Area, whittling spoons, playing with clay, and cooking elaborate meals with friends.
Rachel is a licensed civil engineer in the state of California.
As a professional engineer and VSE Principal, Anthony is committed to the effective and efficient use of material for all building systems. He strives to assist the natural and green building communities by providing leadership for the development of design procedures for natural and green materials and systems, which in turn increases the safe and effective options available to future engineers.
Anthony graduated from the Architectural Engineering program at Penn State University and moved to Berkeley, CA to practice structural design and in particular, straw bale structural design, under Kevin Donahue, SE. Anthony is a board member for the Cob Research Institute (CRI), an organization committed to the development of accessible permitting procedures for cob and other similar earthen materials. In conjunction with CRI, Anthony was the lead engineer of the currently proposed Cob Construction appendix to the International Residential Code (IRC), the first of its kind in the United States. Anthony was a working group member for the development of the first low carbon concrete building code, which was commissioned by Marin County, and organized by the Embodied Carbon Network and the Ecological Building Network. He was also contributed to the Straw Bale Building Detail book published by the California Straw Building Association (CASBA). Anthony has advised, designed, and collaborated in numerous university-based, small scale, and full scale testing programs on the structural behavior of natural materials. He has presented on these topics at various conferences including the West Coast Natural Building Conference and Earth USA.
Anthony believes that by supporting appropriate documentation and code development of environmentally sustaining options, the building community will have the tools to design against the hazards of environmentally destructive construction as effectively as it designs against other safety hazards in the building code.
Massey Burke is the co-director of the California Straw Building Association and a natural materials design/build consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works on research, design, and implementation of natural, low-carbon and carbon-sequestering building techniques, with a specific interest in supply chains and bringing natural building materials into the urban fabric. She helps clients, architects, and contractors design for and manage construction with natural materials, and she partners with organizations including Arup, StopWaste, and the Carbon Leadership Forum to generate technical information and help remove barriers to scaling up natural, carbon sequestering building methods.