Howell spent the next year on a team of engineers that monitored and calculated the strength of the surviving structure that helped to shore the retaining wall of the pit at Ground Zero. Later, Howell completed FEMA urban search and rescue training that educates engineers to better assess post-disaster structure stability when dealing with possible survivors.

“As an engineer, I realized how massive and strong and redundant those towers were,” he says now.” As a young engineer, they seemed indomitable to me. Just by luck, I wasn’t at the tower that day. A lot of the people I worked with there got trapped and died.”

Though Howell and his firm still grieved, there was new work to be done.

Pei, in his eighties and allegedly retired, still had a handful of marquee projects going, including a new 484,000-square-foot Museum of Islamic Art in the emirate of Qatar. Pei wanted someone he could trust as his on-site representative during construction. Howell’s boss recommended him.

So Howell left Manhattan in 2003 and spent 20 months in the developing Middle Eastern nation, charged with ensuring that the general contractor built Pei’s challenging design correctly, levitating triangular slabs with a force of 1,500 tons over the museum’s 40-meter atrium.

As he fought to keep the general contractor on schedule and in compliance with the architect’s wishes, Howell was told to send daily or weekly progress reports to Pei’s office in New York.

“I initially wrote them for his project manager, not thinking that he would see them,” Howell says. “I used them to vent a lot of frustration.”

But the project manager passed along each one to the legendary architect himself, Howell later learned. When Pei visited the construction site in person, Howell tried to stay out of his way, but the young engineer needn’t have worried; Pei was thrilled with his advocate. He spotted Howell and beamed, “Oh, where is my daily report?”

With the museum scheduled to open next fall, Howell is back in Manhattan working on other spectacular buildings, a passion he discovered at FIU after trying and discarding both biology and transportation engineering.

“The signature structures we design are iconic, but, like all buildings, are also tangible,” he says.” They are great modern monuments that, in the cases of the ones I’ve worked on, I can point to and say, ‘I contributed to that.’”

Now Howell is working on what will be one of the world’s tallest buildings, in the Middle Eastern metropolis of Dubai. For now, it is called simply, “The Tall Tower.”

Though the 9/11 attacks taught Howell that even the most impressively engineered structure isn’t invincible, he says he’s inspired by how long the World Trade Center towers remained standing after being extensively damaged – time that gave rescuers a chance to evacuate many of the occupants. Like most of his colleagues, he says, he realizes that iconic buildings may be prime targets for attacks – so he works hard to build in reasonable protection.

“In this age, building security goes far beyond just structural safety,” he says. “There are many more threats, such as biological agents, that can be introduced with just as – or perhaps more – sinister effects.”