Alan Levy

Sydney Opera House

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Alan Levy

Grand designs and movie-making

Alan Levy is a civil engineer whose colourful career spans four continents and includes grand designs such as the Sydney Opera House and forays into film-making.

By Deborah Minors

Alan Levy graduated from Wits in 1956, married Witsie Jeanette Davis in 1959 and then sailed to London, where he landed a job as a principal engineer. Eighteen months later, on the eve of the couple’s departure to Canada, the head of design firm Ove Arup & Partners persuaded Levy to accept the position of resident engineer managing construction of the Sydney Opera House (of which Sir Jack Zunz, a Wits Engineering alumnus, was the principal structural designer).

After Sydney, Levy went to the US and worked on the Seattle Space Needle. Then he bought an old 1940s Buick and drove to New York City. Upon arrival in NYC he stopped at a traffic light and sold the Buick. Levy worked on the design of the Vertical Assembly Building, located in Florida. Designed as the Saturn moon rocket assembly tower, the VAB is said to be the largest enclosed building space in the world – 64 million cubic feet. Occasionally clouds appear on the interior!

Levy moved back to Johannesburg and became Director of Roberts Construction’s design division, where he led the company’s expertise in prefabricated concrete housing and schools.

In the 1970s, Levy took a sabbatical from engineering to make movies. He directed Up the City, a documentary highlighting the ills of cities, including Johannesburg. Another documentary, Creators of Tomorrow, addressed society’s inclination to diminish a child’s imagination. He then produced a feature film, Saboteurs, with an American cast and a storyline concerning a Russian plot to assassinate Western scientists attending a conference at Pelindaba, South Africa’s nuclear facility. He later produced a documentary for the Federal Aviation Administration, Red Alert, which focused on how fire fighters operate at regional American airports.

Levy divorced Jeanette, married Beulah Sacks and returned to America. He resumed engineering studies in Washington, D.C. and became a project manager at Ralph M Parsons, working on the $2.5-billion Northeast Corridor Rail Improvement Programme for the Federal Transportation Administration.

Alan Levy

Then CRS Sirrine hired Levy as Group Vice-President of its mid-Atlantic division. His projects included a $150-million University of Virginia Hospital and two correctional facilities for the New York State Office of General Services. Five years later, Levy held the same position at Sverdrup Corporation, where he oversaw, among others, the $106-million Baltimore Orioles Baseball Stadium.

Today, Levy, 74, works in Washington, D.C. for the US Army and Navy, managing design-build contracts at military installations nationwide. He lives with his wife in Northern Virginia and they have four children and 12 grandchildren.