He has been called the “Einstein of structural engineering” and “the Greatest Structural Engineer of the 20th Century,” yet few people outside of his field know his name. Here is the story of a great American.
Every day of every week Fazlur Khan loved learning something new.
He was born in a part of India that is now the mostly Muslim county of Bangladesh. His father was a teacher; a professional man who taught mathematics in the classroom and wrote textbooks on the side. His father also had a gift that set him off from everyone else. More than just teaching a subject he knew how to inspire students. And he took it upon himself to guide his son’s education.
After dinner Fazlur and his father spent hours together going over schoolwork. His father would make up special problems for Fazlur to figure out, and then they would discuss how he arrived at the solution. Could the problem have been solved differently? With father and son passing ideas back and forth, learning became enjoyable.
But on those hot evenings, Fazlur’s father also talked to his son about life. He talked about the need for generosity in this world. He talked about compassion. He said that the true purpose of learning was to help people. Fazlur must have learned his lessons well. Later on when he worked in the field of architecture, he developed a reputation for being a fantastic problem solver, and he was known for working closely with the people around him.
After receiving his Bachelor of Engineering Degree from the University of Dacca, Fazlur travelled to the United States on a scholarship. He attended the University of Illinois and in a very short period of time earned two master’s degrees and a PhD in structural engineering.
Fazlur Khan joined the architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merril in Chicago in 1960. He became an American citizen in 1967.
Back at that time, most high-rises were built using steel beams. The last thing anyone wanted was a building swaying in the wind, and a skeleton frame was extremely secure. Or as an alternative, walls made out of solid concrete were very strong, and tall buildings could be built with a concrete core. There was a third method using shear trusses—a special form of bracing in the construction of buildings—that was well-known and loved by architects, but that was it.
Also back then, using these construction methods, a high-rise building could only be 20 or maybe 30 stories high. An architect could design a taller building, but the more floors that were added only made the building more inefficient and uneconomical. Believe it or not, the tallest building in Chicago in the middle 1950s was 41-stories tall.
Into this situation stepped Fazlur Khan with his amazing ability to solve problems. One of his first assignments was to design a 37-story reinforced concrete office building—the kind with a solid concrete core. But as his design work went forward, Khan realized that some of the building’s columns could also be used to support the entire structure. While this combination of concrete wall and steel frame construction was not used often in the industry, Fazlur used it for this building. It was a practical design aid that Fazlur made work.
His next project was a 43-story apartment building that was going to be supported by solid concrete walls. This “shear wall construction” was a solid design, but Fazlur had problems matching up the support walls with walls in the floor plan. So, Fazlur went to work on the problem. Maybe it took him a week. Maybe it took him a month. Finally he hit on the idea of placing support columns close to one another along the outside wall of the building and for strength, attaching these steel columns to each other with braces—or as architects like to say, stiff spandrel beams. Fazlur had just invented something completely new in the world of architecture, the “framed tube” building.
But Fazlur didn’t stop there. Over the next five years, he designed the first “trussed tube” building in Chicago, a “tube-in-tube” building for Houston, a “composite tube” building for New Orleans, and finally the “bundled tube” design for what was to remain the tallest building in the world for a generation, the 110-story Sears Tower in Chicago.
Fazlur Khan’s building achievements were not limited to the United States. For the Hajj Terminal in Saudi Arabia, Fazlur used fabric in the design of modern tent-like structures that help shelter Muslim pilgrims.
Fazlur was so vital and creative, his friends were stunned when he died suddenly at the age of 52. To honor him, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat named an award after him. Lehigh University has established a chair in his name. He became the recipient of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
But if you really want to see a tribute to one of America’s greatest structural engineers, just visit any city in the world and look at the beauty of the skyline. Every building over 40 stories tall is a tribute to his memory.
c. 1973 (courtesy Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP)